Every day, on my walk to work, I pass a primary school. A group of little people are being dropped off by parents. They are met at the gates by a teacher who greets them all by name before leading them up the steps to breakfast club. In the cold and dark of winter, with the school’s windows glowing invitingly, I sometimes envy these children their warm, welcoming cocoon.

I thought of that daily scene often when reading this book, which is inspired by Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s time as Waterstones children’s laureate. During his laureateship he ran a campaign with the literary charity BookTrust called Reading Rights, addressing literacy inequality for children in poverty. It was prompted by the discovery that nearly half of children were arriving at school without having been read to. Many had no clue how books worked. They were trying to swipe rather than turn pages, or expand illustrations by pinching them with their fingers.

Cottrell-Boyce, the author of children’s novels Millions and Cosmic among much else, is the ideal face for such a campaign. A longstanding school visitor, he has a feeling for the way kids who don’t meet the usual spelling and neatness benchmarks can get overlooked. His worldview is a distinctive brand of Liverpool-Catholic collectivism, which homes in on disparities of wealth and how they can tantalise and demoralise children. One Birkenhead school he visits is near the cruise terminal where luxury liners float at anchor – “a good place to see money, but that money is sailing by, without a second glance at these terraced streets”.

In the course of the campaign, he makes a salutary discovery. A teacher says to him: “Maybe don’t go on about the summer holidays. They hate them.” Summer, that time for adventure when the Famous Five explore smugglers’ coves in Cornwall and the snow melts in Moominland, is no longer seen as a glorious escape. For many children, it feels like a banishment from their happy place, school, where society finally takes notice of them. With its breakfast and after-school clubs extending the day at both ends, school has become a site of security and safety as much as one of education. He wonders if this is what makes the Harry Potter and Percy Jackson books so beloved: they portray school as a refuge.

Recalling that his parents talked about their experience as wartime evacuees for the rest of their lives, Cottrell-Boyce argues that “any crisis is like a barium meal, illuminating the weak spots in the body of the state”. Austerity followed by the Covid years has transformed children’s lives. Schools were once part of an ecosystem of support for children and their parents that included libraries, youth clubs and Sure Start centres. Now, in many places, “the school is the last evidence of a civic sphere – the Alamo of services”. He finds teachers exhausted because they are doubling up as therapists, nutritionists and social workers, trying to assuage the effects of a vast social injustice. Primary teachers, especially in reception, have become caregivers, because many children do not arrive “school ready” – that is, toilet-trained. He comes across schools that have discreetly installed launderettes, or maintain a store of “pre-loved” school clothes.

Cottrell-Boyce is particularly exercised about the housing crisis that has stranded many children in cheap hotels and other forms of temporary accommodation. Of the children who move house more than 10 times between reception and year 11, just 11% pass five or more GCSEs. With this comes furniture poverty. Social housing is normally let “void standard”: empty and unfurnished. Cottrell-Boyce finds it especially shocking that so many children are denied the little kingdom – Robert Louis Stevenson called it “the land of counterpane” – that is their own bed. The Merseyside charity Time for Bed gave out 582 bed bundles (bedframe, mattress and bedding) last year.

If I have made this sound like a miserable book, it isn’t. It is interlaced with luminous bits of autobiography, mainly of the author’s early years living in a flat just off Liverpool’s Dock Road, sharing a room with his parents and brother. Remembering lascar sailors in turbans or fezzes, and merchant sailors all in white, he now sees that this introduced him to one of the oldest stories of all: that ofthe stranger arriving on shore, from Odysseus to Sinbad.

Back then, he says, the next parish “might as well have been the Orinoco” and “Bootle was more or less Narnia”. He and his brother would sit in the window spotting aunts, uncles and cousins in the passing crowd. His human geography was so contained that he had no idea he lived near the Mersey until one day, out of the window, he saw a pair of bright red funnels moving above the rooftops. Then his family moved to a half-finished suburban housing estate where, amid the smell of raw timber and fresh putty, he finally had a wardrobe where an entrance to Narnia could be imagined.

These scenes support the book’s overall argument: a child is a camera with the shutter open. “Every baby is Galileo,” Cottrell-Boyce says, watching his granddaughter’s miraculous acquisition of language and motor skills. Professor Sam Wass of the University of East London Baby Development Lab tells him: “A few days or weeks ago, you were an aquatic creature, and now, all of a sudden, you are in east London. Where do you even begin to make sense of that?” A child is a magical sponge, soaking up the world. The downside of this miracle is that bad experiences – of black mould, cockroaches, moonlight flits, domestic violence, debt – stay with a child for ever.

Refreshingly, Cottrell-Boyce does not think of reading as a moral education. Some of the best-loved tales in the Arabian Nights, he points out, revel in lying, cheating and selfish ambition. One of the most famous, the tale of Abu Hasan, is about a fart. Lots of lullabies depict babies being killed or stolen. Frank L Baum, the author of The Wizard of Oz, was an apologist for the genocide of Native Americans; Roald Dahl was a committed antisemite.

What matters when reading to a child is something that can’t be measured in our new age of “utilitarian rationalism”, he argues. It has little to do with the content of a book and everything to do with creating a moment of shared attention and mutual noticing. June O’Sullivan of the London Early Years Foundation calls it “the pedagogy of the sofa”. It is the antithesis of the frictionless, forever time of the digital world (Cottrell-Boyce is not a fan of Cocomelon, the YouTube channel for kids, mostly because it can be streamed endlessly). The crucial element is familiar routine, which can only happen when children have furniture such as beds and sofas, and clothes kept in something other than bin bags.

This book’s chapters are “expanded diary entries”, Cottrell-Boyce concedes, mostly written on trains and in Premier Inns during his laureateship. He has a chatty, unguarded, slightly repetitive style, and an overfondness for ramming points home with the single-sentence paragraph. But he makes the case for how British childhood has changed, and why that matters, with trenchancy and heart. The children whose school assemblies he graces are lucky to have him.

Frank Cottrell-Boyce has urged policymakers to treat children’s reading as a “right” rather than a parental duty, warning that Britain is failing to understand the emotional and social value of reading, as new research shows a sharp decline in daily shared reading at home.

Speaking at the Royal Institution in his final laureate lecture, The Kids Are Not Alright, the children’s laureate linked falling shared reading rates to poverty, housing insecurity and social media.

“Our children have been at the sharp end of two great crises: Covid, and just as damagingly, austerity,” Cottrell-Boyce said in his lecture. “We can talk all we like about [the importance of] bedtime stories … but what does that mean to a child with no bed? Or no space for a bed?”

He said that this “furniture poverty”, alongside housing insecurity, means that children are unable to build stable routines around reading. “You’re not going to Narnia because you haven’t got a wardrobe,” he said “Your clothes are stored in bin bags ready for the next move.”

New figures from BookTrust, released to coincide with the lecture, show that daily shared reading among families with children aged eight and under has fallen from 60% in 2021 to 49% in 2025. Yet the proportion of children who “like or love reading” has risen from 66% to 80% over the same period, suggesting that enthusiasm for books remains strong.

It comes as the UK celebrates the National Year of Reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates. The campaign includes launching the first Children’s Booker prize, with a judging panel chaired by Cottrell-Boyce. Three children aged 8-12 will be recruited to help adjudicate. The campaign also involves distributing 72,000 books to children in need, and fostering a “national mission” to make reading a daily habit.

Alongside economic pressures, Cottrell-Boyce told the Guardian about the impact of screens and social media on children’s attention. He said concerns about “addictive” tech platforms were now unavoidable, arguing that children’s attention is being captured by systems designed to maximise engagement.

“These kids are working for big tech,” he said. “We all are. But you’re working for someone who doesn’t love you, who is not going to pay you and doesn’t care how many hours you work. It’s a shocking situation we’ve got ourselves into.”

Referring to the growing legal and political scrutiny of technology companies, he added: “These platforms should bear total responsibility. I think these trials are a bit like the big tobacco moment.”

He added that we have failed to communicate what reading offers beyond literacy outcomes. “Reading has become so bound up with attainment and literacy, that we’ve failed to get across the emotional benefits, the fact that it is fun and should be done for pleasure,” he said.

Despite the scale of the challenges, Cottrell-Boyce said he remains optimistic about children’s reading habits and the work already being done in communities. “Pessimism is a luxury that we can’t afford,” he said. “I do feel optimistic. I’ve met amazing people and seen amazing practice that costs next to nothing.”

Cottrell-Boyce has used his two-year tenure as children’s laureate to promote his Reading Rights campaign, which argues that shared reading should be embedded in early years support, from health visitors to family hubs. The new children’s laureate will be announced in July.

Children’s laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce is calling on Keir Starmer’s government to “stand up and give a visible sign that this country values its children”.

The author is holding a summit on children’s reading in Liverpool on Wednesday, at which the children’s commissioner for England, Rachel de Souza, and former children’s laureates Michael Rosen and Cressida Cowell are also set to speak.

The Reading Rights Summit is part of Cottrell-Boyce’s broader campaign to address the “invisible privilege and inequality” within children’s reading.

The event will feature speeches and panels made up of professionals across education, science, health and politics with the view of sharing best practice and making recommendations to policymakers.

Cottrell-Boyce, who was announced as the children’s laureate in July last year, wants to “turn the dial” on the conversation about reading. “People always couch it in terms of educational attainment and cultural capital, and these things are really important. But I’d also like to bring into the limelight the health benefits and the mental health benefits.”

He wants to “move the conversation, for now, out of school” and into homes and nurseries. His speech at the summit will highlight research from BookTrust which found that six out of 10 parents and carers of 0- to seven-year-olds wish they had known earlier how important it is to read with their children.

“We know that if you arrive at school never having been read to, you’ve been given this enormous disadvantage. Your first encounter with a book is as this sort of alien piece of kit” that you have to decode. “You’re at a massive disadvantage over kids whose first experience of a book is cuddled up on the sofa.”

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In his speech, Cottrell-Boyce will also draw attention to children “who instead of turning the pages, try to swipe them or make the pictures grow bigger with their fingers”.

Children are facing a “happiness recession”, which “really puzzles me and makes me anxious”, said Cottrell-Boyce. He noted that children have “borne the brunt of a series of crises” – austerity, the pandemic and Brexit. “These all hit children first and hardest.”

Alex McCormick – who raised more than £250,000 for Spellow Hub library, torched by rioters last summer – will also speak at the summit. “My laureateship began under the baleful light of the burning of a library”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “The people who did that did not know how to make sense of the world.”

Cottrell-Boyce said focusing on literacy in early years takes an “act of courage” by government, because the outcomes will play out “in 20 years” rather than the short-term. However, “it can be done quite easily” – “so many of the problems that we’re facing seem intractable, and I think this is completely fixable”.

“We need Wes Streeting, Bridget Phillipson, Lisa Nandy – and more – to come together and help us make sure that every single child has access to books, reading and the transformative ways in which they improve long-term life chances”, said Cottrell-Boyce. “Put simply, shared reading is an effective, economic health intervention that should be available to all.”