The Department for Education has published a document called 10 top tips for parents to encourage children to read. As one might have predicted, this has received hoots of derision from some educators on Twitter.

I don’t usually grace ill-conceived comments with a response, and I’m certain no fan of the DfE — see, for example, my critique of their communications policy. However, I did fire off a couple of tweets in defence of this document, because all of this guidance seems good to me.

The first tip is “Encourage your child to read”, and under that heading are citing some of the benefits of reading. That statement was singled out for ridicule, as was Tip #3, which suggests you leave reading matter lying around the house so that people can pick some up wherever they happen to be.

I’m pretty sure that the Society of Authors would agree with such statements. See its statement about where it stands on reading. I know in my personal life I love being able to pick up a book or a magazine or newspaper anywhere in the house, or on a device. If you want children to read, you have to remove the barriers to reading — one of which, surely, is not having any reading matter to hand. I’ve been into homes where there is not a book to be seen. What an arid environment in which to bring up kids.

Even in my professional life, as head of department in several schools I set up a library in my classrooms, and it worked really well. Pupils would use the magazines and books there for research, or simply for pleasure between tasks.

My one beef with the DfE is that, as Natasha Chaudbury points out, hundreds of libraries have been closed since 2010:

Thus there is a complete lack of joined-up thinking on the part of the DfE, or of unintended consequences: libraries encourage reading and make books accessible; research has shown that reading helps to improve life chances and social mobility.

When I was growing up the local library was like a second home. We couldn’t afford many books (they were not as cheap as chips back then), so the library was a kind of haven. I wrote about these matters in Libraries: R.I.P. The statistics are even worse now than when I wrote that article.

I think we should all be encouraging kids to read, especially writers. After all, if kids aren’t reading (and I include audio books under that heading), what happens to our livelihoods in the long run? Also, I’m sure I read about some research which says that people who read are much more likely to write. That seems commonsense to me anyway. Certainly, if someone does have a predilection for writing, reading (well-written stuff) will help them improve. See Reasons to read #7: the more one reads, the better writer they become, and Good reading for would-be good writers.