National Literacy Trust and easyJet team to get kids reading over summer

The National Literacy Trust has teamed up with airline easyJet to encourage children to practice their reading, writing, drawing and communication skills over the summer holidays.

‘Flybraries’ will be on 296 aircrafts this summer, putting 17,500 children’s books into passenger seat pockets to help encourage children to read on their flight.

easyJet kicked off the campaign by launching new research which found that over a fifth (22%) of parents said their child has not visited a public library in over a year, and three-quarters of parents (75%) were worried that their children’s vocabulary might be negatively affected by reading fewer books.

The National Literacy Trust meanwhile conducted research to show that three-quarters of a million (770,129) school children don’t own a book of their own. That’s one child in 11 (9.4%) in the UK, rising to one child in eight (13.1%) from disadvantaged backgrounds.

Jonathan Douglas, director of the National Literacy Trust: “Books have the power to transform children’s lives, which is why it is so alarming that more than three-quarters of a million children in the UK don’t have a single book of their own, and one in five haven’t been to a library in the past year. Getting books into the hands of children, and helping them discover a love of reading, can set them on the path to a more successful future. easyJet’s Flybrary initiative is a fantastic way of getting thousands of children into reading this summer.”