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Children's News Children’s Laureateship
Children’s Laureate Cowell opens tenure with creativity plea and 10-point plan
Cressida Cowell has been named the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate and she has set out a 10-point plan to boost reading for pleasure and creativity
Charlotte Eyre @charlotteleyre C
ressida Cowell, the new Waterstones Children’s Laureate, has drawn up a
10-point charter (see right), which she said is her “big to-do” list during her two-year laureateship. Cowell was “gobsmacked” when BookTrust rang to ask her to take up the position, and she said that geting children to read for fun is a “big, interconnected problem... There are lots of areas where you have to be active, and they are all areas I’m going to try and act in”. Her charter states that every child has the right to own their own book and see themselves reflected in a book, among other things, but the How to Train Your Dragon author is going to start by focusing on two key areas: librar- ies and creativit. She told The Bookseller: “A question I keep asking is, if parents can’t afford books, and don’t live near a public library, and if the child’s school doesn’t have a library, how is a child supposed to become a reader? No one can give me an answer to this. I think books should be for everyone.” Speaking to governments and
policymakers will be part of the plan, but she wants to come up with practical solutions, too.
16 12th July 2019
“Ideally [school] libraries would be statutory and part of Ofsted, and I can call for that. But if it doesn’t happen, what can we do? Let’s see if there are any practical suggestions for ways it could happen.”
Cowell will also call for schoolchildren to be given at least 15 minutes every week when they can be creative, whether that be writing a story or designing a video game, and for teachers not to mark whatever it is the child has done. This point of the
charter leads on from a campaign called Free Writing Friday, launched last year because of “heart- breaking” feedback from parents, who said their children were too anxious about making mistakes to be creative. For Cowell, giving children time to be creative has numerous benefits, academic and otherwise. “There is a whole load of research that says children who read and write for the joy of it do beter academically,” she said, but was keen to point out that a book she
Our creative industries perform on the world stage [but] creative subjects are seen as ‘soft’ subjects—what does that say about how we value culture?
Cressida Cowell, Children’s Laureate
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