Brilliant ideas to encourage reading for pleasure

Explore tips and ideas that focus on key skills and ideas that will help your school create a reading culture and can be used year-round and across the school to help you encourage reading for pleasure. Our research shows that pupils seek autonomy in their reading choices, searching for ideas that inspire their interests and reflect their own reality.

The resources can be used across all phases to inspire staff and pupils alike to find what they enjoy reading. There are tips for children about how to choose the right book, and ideas for teachers and school library coordinators to share reading initiative ideas, engage the whole school community in reading, and to celebrate reading in the classroom.

Find out more about how to encourage reading for pleasure.

The resources

Our collection of resources includes ideas for staff, and also attractive posters that you can print and display to start peer-to-peer discussion and recommendations.

• There are lots of ways to celebrate reading in school - share the tried and tested reading initiatives in our resource Brilliant ideas to help you encourage reading with colleagues and see which ones would work best in your school
• Teachers make great reading role models; our How you can support reading resource will help everyone support reading in the classroom and school library.
• Sometimes, children can struggle with selecting their next read - our how to choose a book poster will help them find just the right book for themselves and can be displayed in the school library and classroom.
• Display and share the book chat starters poster primed with questions that give pupils ideas for questions whether they've not started their book, are part way through, or have reached the end
• Let's talk books - explore these teacher initiated book discussion activities to get your pupils talking about what they enjoy reading, and why!
• Try these behind the book poster questions to delve further into plot and character.
• Have your say...give pupils the chance to feed in to how they would like to experience reading at school.

Download all these resources from the available files section of this page.

Further resources

We support all those working in school libraries through our Love our Libraries programme.

If you are interested in using audio books in the classroom then take a look at our premium resource page Research into Practice: Enhancing learning through audio.