As schools, families and communities across the country mark World Book Day 2026, Manchester Met is highlighting the vital role that reading plays – not only in improving literacy, but in strengthening relationships, boosting confidence and enriching lives at every age.
In recent years, concerns have grown about a national literacy crisis in children and young people, with the National Literacy Trust reporting that only one in three 8 to 18-year-olds say they enjoy reading in their free time. To tackle this, the Department of Education has marked 2026 as The National Year of Reading, a campaign aiming to make reading a regular part of our lives.
However, reading with your child is not just beneficial for educational reasons. According to research by Dr Mel Hall, Senior Lecturer in Childhood and Education Studies at Manchester Metropolitan University, the activity is a vital relational experience between young children and their parents or carers.
Dr Hall said: “We know that reading is a passport to other educational skills, but I think it’s also important that we don’t confine it just to a very one-dimensional view of what literacy and what reading is.
“It might be storytelling as families or even engaging with multimodal aspects of different technology. It’s really valuable if children have got access to that full spectrum of literacy experiences.
“Although assumptions due to social class can result in the stigmatisation of some parents, our research illustrated that parents from a range of backgrounds all wanted to read with their children and wanted their children to be confident readers.”
Manchester Met has contributed to important research on the impact of reading on children’s development, from evaluations showing how paired‑reading programmes boost primary pupils’ skills and motivation, to research from academics questioning the effectiveness of phonics‑only approaches to children’s literacy.
Andrew McMillan, Professor of Contemporary Writing at Manchester Met’s Manchester Writing School, emphasises that storytelling remains a cornerstone of how people understand themselves and others.
He said: “Reading in everyday life is vital for us all because, at its core, telling and sharing and writing stories about ourselves, about our families, about our lives, where we’ve come from and where we live is at the very centre of what it means to be a human being; reading, be it through the page, through braille, through an audiobook, through images, is how we learn each other stories, how we learn empathy and how we learn the great trick of imagination.”
Manchester Met is home to the North West’s first public poetry library, a research centre and collection of contemporary poetry in multiple languages. It is the only poetry library in the UK to be supported by a university and hosts events, workshops and poetry readings with an eye to engaging with the local community.
To find out more about literature and poetry events at Manchester Met, please click the link here.
