Recent national discussion around literacy has highlighted a growing concern: in focusing heavily on measurable literacy outcomes, schools may unintentionally be losing something equally important, children’s love of reading.

In her recent article, Charlotte Hacking reflects on findings from The Reading Paradox: How Our Focus on Literacy is Undermining Reading for Pleasure, exploring how decades of policy, assessment pressures, and highly structured approaches to reading have contributed to declining engagement with books among children and young people.

The article argues that while phonics, assessment, and literacy intervention all have an important role, reading must also remain deeply human: connected to identity, imagination, discussion, enjoyment, and belonging.

This is exactly the thinking underpinning the Literacy Skills Courses and Talk Through Text programmes being delivered at BDSIP.

Our courses support schools to move beyond reading as a purely measurable outcome and instead help students become confident, engaged readers who read because they want to not simply because they have to.

Through structured talk, purposeful intervention, high-quality texts, and evidence-informed practice, students are developing:

• greater reading confidence
• stronger comprehension
• increased participation in discussion
• improved motivation to read
• deeper engagement with texts
• growing habits of independent reading and reading for pleasure

The impact is reflected most powerfully in student voice.

One Year 7 student shared:

“Reading used to be boring, but now I read every night before bed.”

Another explained:

“I didn’t think reading was for me before. Now I’ve found books I actually enjoy.”

Students also describe growing confidence in classrooms:

“I used to avoid reading aloud, but now I feel more confident in class.”

And perhaps most importantly, many are beginning to associate reading with enjoyment rather than anxiety:

“Reading feels relaxing now instead of stressful.”

These changes matter.

As Charlotte Hacking’s article highlights, reading for pleasure is strongly linked not only to attainment, but also to wellbeing, empathy, communication, and lifelong learning. At a time when national surveys show declining reading engagement among children and young people, creating cultures where students experience reading as meaningful and enjoyable has never been more important.

Our Literacy Skills and Talk Through Text courses aim to help schools build exactly that culture through practical strategies, structured discussion, support for reluctant readers, and sustainable whole-school approaches to literacy development.

Developing confident readers who read not only because they have to but because they want to.