Bring back storytime!

Our client, innovative children’s publisher Egmont Books, has just announced the launch of an exciting campaign to make daily storytime statutory for Key Stages 1 and 2 (Ages 7-11) in school. This follows FK&Y’s research ‘Stories and Choices’, carried out over the last year with one of our UK Panel schools, St Joseph’s Catholic Primary Academy, Stoke on Trent. The research explored the impact of reading aloud to Key Stage 2 children each day in class. Supporting teachers is of paramount importance to Egmont, but it was clear that while children benefited enormously from the experience of being read to in class, we observed that fitting this into the existing national curriculum was a challenge. And yet findings illustrate that there was a noticeable improvement to reading levels – 10 months on average – twice the predicted levels. Egmont has launched a Government Petition here with the aim to get 100,000 signatures to enable the issue to be debated in Parliament.