The National Literacy Trust's 2018 report on letter writing highlighted the enduring appeal of writing letters to connect people. Many children and young people also said that they write letters to make the person they are writing to happy. This has never been truer now. This report of responses to a survey from early 2021 shows that children and…

Listening to children's experiences of writing during the first lockdown in spring 2020, it became clear that for many it had been a time of increased creativity, with children writing everything from songs and stories to scripts, and some even beginning their own novels. Another prominent theme in the research last summer was that having more…

Research has shown that book ownership has a significant impact on life outcomes. In 2019, we found that that children who reported that they had a book of their own were not only more engaged with reading but also six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than children who did not own a book (22% vs. 3.6%). We included…

The National Literacy Trust's research during the first national lockdown in spring 2020 showed that more children and young people said that they enjoyed reading and more read more often during lockdown compared with before the pandemic. Children and young people's comments suggested that this was because they suddenly had time to (re)engage with…