I’m on a train. All around me, people are looking at screens, and most of them are either reading or typing. One or two are watching videos, but a good proportion are engaging with the written word.

Meanwhile, we are told the UK is in the throes of a reading crisis. Much of the concern is driven by the National Literacy Trust’s annual research, showing that the percentage of young people who say they enjoy reading for pleasure is at its lowest level for 20 years. And recently it’s been hard to escape the government’s response, the National Year of Reading. Credit to its organiser, the National Literacy Trust, for getting the initiative such widespread media coverage, but what is the programme honestly setting out to achieve? More reading of any kind, even if it’s text on a social media app? In truth, this a big promotional campaign for books, and there’s plenty to like about that.

Like many readers of The Bookseller, I have skin in the game. My job is to bring Simon Armitage’s vision of a new National Poetry Centre to life here in Leeds, creating an organisation that helps raise the profile of poetry and stimulate new interest in an undervalued literary form. So, it’s music to my ears not only that there’s a desire to encourage more reading but that the initiative is focusing on poetry, non-fiction and audiobooks, as well as novels.

Even so, the National Year of Reading needs a clear sense of what success looks like: what ‘more reading’ means, and how we measure people doing it. I’m convinced that there are many people who are reading and engaging with creative thinking, even if they aren’t ‘reading books for pleasure’. They might be writing fan fiction, scribbling in diaries, recording songs or penning spoken word poetry. All in the name of exploring their own emotions and trying to make sense of their place in the world.

By way of illustration, this year the National Poetry Centre has been working with the National Literacy Trust on the Young Poet Laureate programme, involving 130,000 school students in more than 1,000 schools across England with the support of Arts Council England, the West Yorkshire Combined Authority and the Charlotte Aitken Trust. The levels of engagement are significant: feedback shows that thousands of young people have been gaining real enjoyment from working with poets to create verse of their own. This is gratifying because our work has been focused on regions with lower-than-average literacy levels. I’ve read hundreds of the poems and it’s clear that the concerns of young people include climate crisis, war, self-confidence and friendship.

Who knows – reading-for-pleasure questionnaires might well indicate that these young poets are choosing not to read many books in their spare time. But they are certainly writing poetry and, just as importantly, they are acting as ambassadors for poetry among their peers and teachers.

I don’t mean to imply that the research is entirely misleading, or that reading in the UK is problem free. Soaring levels of inequality and the defunding of libraries are the result of successive political regimes that prioritised privatisation and minimal state expenditure. Reading for pleasure is surely only one factor in that complex and multidimensional concept of literacy.

If getting people not just to read more, but to read more books is the aim, the answer lies not only in reading itself but in a wider societal worldview that prioritises knowledge, ideas and creative thinking

There’s a separate strand of National Literacy Trust (NLT) research that garners fewer headlines than the moral-panic-inducing stuff about reading for pleasure. It shows, with great consistency, that growing up with books in the home has a positive influence on learning and literacy. Surprisingly, the numbers run counter to the crisis headlines: the percentage of children aged between five and eight who own books has actually been growing since 2019. Back then, 81% owned a book whereas by 2025 the figure had risen to 92%.

If getting people not just to read more, but to read more books is the aim, the answer lies not only in reading itself but in a wider societal worldview that prioritises knowledge, ideas and creative thinking. If we grow up surrounded by books, they signal to us that ideas are to be valued and taken seriously. What’s also needed is the common agreement that acquiring knowledge and gaining an education are things that will give us real benefits in life. The fact that a former prime minister derided "Mickey Mouse degrees" surely didn’t help. And the fact that students are now saddled with impossibly unaffordable loans is definitely no incentive.

The NLT research shows that fewer young people receiving free school meals say they have a book of their own. This is an era of massive inequality: the number of people in the UK living in very deep poverty has risen to almost 7 million, and the number of people who are food insecure rose by 60% between 2021 and 2023. Against this backdrop, Scotland’s long-running Bookbug programme – giving bundles of free books to all children under the age of five – feels vital. It’s also great to see the Year of Reading giving thousands of books to children via its partnership with the Premier League Foundation.

Aside from encouraging people to read more books, the most valuable outcome of 2026 would be the rekindling of a belief in the UK that knowledge is valuable – culturally and economically. Achieving that goal will take more courageous government intervention: the National Year of Reading shouldn’t be the culmination, but just the start.