What Kids Are Reading Report 2015

The 2015 What Kids Are Reading Report
acknowledges a possible gender-bias in the
selection of children's books available in UK schools.

Following on from the comments of literacy consultant Sarah Threlkeld-Brown and editor Alison Sage quoted in my post earlier this month, I’m heartened to see that a growing number of people are prepared to acknowledge that there may be a pro-female gender-bias in the world of children’s literature that is influencing the literacy gender gap.

The 2015 What Kids Are Reading report, published this morning, analyses the reading habits of over half a million children in over 2,700 UK schools. Here’s a quote from the report’s website that’s in keeping with my own comments in the “School” and “Library” sections of my COOL not CUTE essay.

Professor Keith Topping, who wrote the What Kids Are Reading report, suggests that the reading preferences of teachers and librarians could be influencing the book choices children make. Worryingly, this trend could be disadvantaging boys at the expense of girls.

And from the report itself:

Page 16

It will not have escaped the reader’s attention that almost all the books in these lists are fiction – storybooks. Children like fiction, but they also like non-fiction. We know that boys in particular are interested in non-fiction. So why is it that so many fiction books are chosen? Is it something to do with the reading preferences of school teachers and librarians, who might tend to encourage pupils to read fiction but not non-fiction? This is likely to result in higher performance by girls, who are known to favour fiction. Is this a gendered preference, so that the predominantly female primary school teachers and the half of secondary school teachers who are female prefer fiction and are unconsciously promoting fiction at the expense of non-fiction and disadvantaging boys?

Page 26

Teachers should be aware of the very different student preferences for reading over time and the marked differences in preferences in secondary between boys and girls (although not necessarily encouraging them!).

The report includes statistics on the most read and most loved books (the two aren’t necessarily the same) and a “Most Popular Authors” chart can be found here. Following on from my comments about the Waterstones Children’s Book Prize in an earlier post, the chart shows that, while male children's authors may be increasingly out of favour with the booksellers that select the Waterstones shortlists, they are currently very popular with children of both sexes, with 7 of the 10 most popular children’s authors being male.