Promoting reading 1
project. This project was carried out jointly by
the City of Stockholm’s social services department, the Department of Social Work at Stockholm University, the Stockholm regional library, and Bokspindeln (The book spider), the latter being a platform for reading promotion projects and tasks. The free book pack contains a fiction book and a non-fiction book, a letter from one of the authors, and a letter from a nearby library. As well as providing free books, the pack is also intended to serve as a reminder that the library exists. This activity has a British forerunner in the Letterbox Club, which is based on a similar concept. The British Letterbox Club was evaluated using before and after measurements with the standardised instruments on a large number of children during the first two years of the project, and the results showed significant improvements in literacy in both years (Griffiths et al., 2010). Just like Bookstart, the Letterbox Club works under the auspices of the British charity BookTrust, and more evaluations of the Letterbox Club are available on this organisation’s website. Bookstart The British book gifting programme Bookstart began as a project in Birmingham in 1992, on the initiative of the reading promotion charity organisation BookTrust. In 2013, Bookstart was represented in 38 countries on all continents. The British Bookstart is a programme that involves, among other things, distributing free books to families with children aged 6–9 months via child health centres. Bookstart is a highly collaborative project that entails partnering between a number of professional groups and organisations, such as disability organisations of various kinds (Cooling 2011). Bookstart reaches over two million children and their families each year (Bird 2014). BookTrust’s website describes the activity as the flagship of BookTrust’s portfolio of book gifting initiatives. There are now also extended Bookstart programmes tailored to specific target groups. For example, Bookstart Corner has a particular focus on socially disadvantaged families. Bookstart has been the subject of several studies and evaluations over the years and it would be too much to give an account of them all here. A number of reports on Bookstart, Bookstart Corner and Bookstart+ are available on the BookTrust website. For example, Bookstart has been evaluated by researchers Barrie Wade and Maggie Moore several times, and they have been able to establish good results from the programme. The programme Bookstart+ was evaluated by O’Hare & Connolly (2010), who were able to demonstrate, among other things, improved attitudes among parents to reading with their children and increased library use as results of the programme. A major study of Bookstart (NCRCL 2001) conducted at the National Centre for Research in Children’s Literature at the University of Surrey in Roehampton reported the following results: • Increased reading (more often and more) with infants and small children by parents/ guardians • Increase in the number of library memberships for children • More parents/guardians valuing reading for infants and small children • Increased self-confidence in reading aloud to children • Greater awareness of the role of reading in speech and language development. 33