World Book Day

7th March 2025

As ‘Spring had sprung’ it’s felt that little bit easier to get up and about this week. It does make the daily routines that bit more manageable. Thank you for all of your endeavours this past week. It’s been busy, yet again.

A significant focus, across all of our institutions, has been World Book Day; mostly observed on Thursday (the official World Book Day) but on Friday at Sitwell. I’m sure that for all, not just the children and young people but the adults involved too, the day/week has been very pleasurable and it certainly has had a positive impact on the atmosphere in the school/college this week – and that’s before we discuss the social and learning benefits.

World Book Day does provide a fantastic opportunity to focus on reading for pleasure, embedding the habit of reading, encouraging that love of reading, which will last throughout the year and on into the rest of one’s life.

There can be few things that we do which will have such a significant long-term impact upon life chances. We do not under-estimate the value of a strong literacy foundation for us all. There will be some who ignore the evidence and suggest that parents just ought to do better. The reality is, as we all know, much more nuanced and complicated than that. Some of our community has a shallow literacy foundation – maybe individuals didn’t have access to books, time for reading or support for comprehension, in their childhood, into adulthood. Some of our community will have grown up in homes where books were rare – due (usually) to economic circumstances. Some of our community will have had very challenging childhoods and may not have been able to value education. The list goes on.

What we do know is that we have a choice in our schools and in the college. Do we label? Do we blame? Do we dismiss? Hopefully not! Whatever the reasons behind the ‘why’ we cannot, we will not, we should not punish the child for their personal or family histories. And when it comes to reading, when it comes to a love of literature, we might just need to do that ‘parenting’ ourselves. We model, we celebrate, we are patient.

Thank you for your willingness to participate so enthusiastically. That enthusiasm does ‘rub-off’ on your children and young people. Many of our pupils/students will have, not only, been engaged this week, but enthused. Someone, at least one, will have germinated that seed of reading for pleasure as a consequence of our collective enthusiasm for reading.

‘Reading is to the mind what exercise is to the body’. Joseph Addison

‘I was reading the dictionary. I thought it was a poem about everything’. Steven Wright

‘I was reading a book… ‘the history of glue’ – I couldn’t put it down’. Tim Vine

‘There are three kinds of men. The one that learns by reading. The few who learn by observation. The rest of them have to pee on the electric fence for themselves’. Will Rogers

‘When I read about the evils of drinking, I gave up reading’. Henny Youngman