The Reading Agency’s Chatterbooks is an extracurricular reading initiative that aims to increase a child’s motivation to read. This report shows that children held more positive attitudes towards reading, read more frequently and felt more confident about their reading skills after taking part in Chatterbooks activities.
The National Literacy Trust was commissioned by The Reading Agency to evaluate the impact of a delivery model that focused on school-based rather than library-based activities. Our evaluation found that, at the end of the project, fewer children said they read only when they had to and that they couldn’t find things to read that interested them. In addition, there was a 22% increase in the number of children who said they read daily over the course of the project, and 49.1% of children felt they were very good readers at the end of Chatterbooks compared to 41.1% before. Twice as many children said they were a member of their local library after taking part in Chatterbooks.
Data were analysed from 114 schools that ran Chatterbooks between September 2015 and April 2016, and findings were based on 1,430 pre- and 1,141 post-project responses to an online survey completed by children aged 8 to 11.