Issue 129

Congratulations on your appointment as the Australian Children’s Laureate 2024–2025. Your theme as Laureate is ‘All kids can be readers’. Can you share what this theme means to you?

What I’ll bring to my term as Laureate is the idea that reading isn’t something we’re all born with the capacity to do. It’s a skill that needs to be taught.

We have brains that are wired at birth to be able to speak and to hear, but reading is a skill which we need to be explicitly taught and that requires rewiring of part of our brain. For some children, this is something that will appear to happen quite quickly and effortlessly. I was lucky enough to be one of those children, as were my two older sons. But other children will need to be explicitly taught and will potentially need extra support during those important formative years, and that was the case for my third son.

Over these two years I really want to focus on the importance of ensuring kids receive the correct instruction that they’ll need for those early years. To help them avoid falling through the gaps, we need to really understand that there are many ways in which children can be included in hearing, sharing and telling stories. It could be through audiobooks, potentially, for people who are vision impaired with Braille, or comics or car manuals! Whatever it is that engages kids with language and storytelling so that we ensure that all kids can be readers.

You’ve mentioned wanting to highlight that stories can be accessed in numerous ways as part of your role as laureate. Is this perspective influenced by the evolving ways people engage with stories in 2024?

To give you a little bit of a background, when my younget son was in Grade 3 he really started to plateau in reading. This is quite common for children who have learning differences – it’s often not until about Grade 3 that it really becomes evident. Often, children can memorise enough words to look like they’re reading for those first few years and then it’s not until their peers start to move ahead to more challenging books that they will plateau and sometimes their behaviour will change. This was the case for my youngest son.

He started saying things like ‘ I hate books’ and ‘I hate reading’ and ‘I hate school’ and I didn’t really understand how to properly support him back then. His dyslexia diagnosis really made me understand the importance of how reading isn’t just about engaging with great stories, which is what we want for all our children, but how you engage with school.

For the first three years of school, we’re being taught to read. Then, after that, we’re expected to read to learn. My son is quite bright, but he’s wasn’t really able to keep up with or engage with the traditional classroom. As a result, his self-esteem and his mental health deteriorated. By the time he got to high school, it was a complete disaster.

I learnt a lot through that experience and started to heavily research what we can do to ensure children don’t fall through the cracks. I did a lot of interviews with specialists and people who went through school who were neurodivergent or dyslexic and wrote a book about this subject. It’s essentially the book that I needed when my son first started school and was written to give to parents about to start the same journey. It’s called Wild Things: How we learn to read and what can happen if we don’t. The things that I want to bring to my role as Laureate are about the importance of early identification of learning differences and intervention, where possible. Also, how to create a supportive environment for kids who may be neurodivergent.

One of the things that I had to learn to better support my son was to get over my snobbism around reading books. I found reading easy and accessible, and so I had a very narrow idea of what reading was. But because we now have access to incredible technology, including the internet, my son was able to access information in a way that he wouldn’t have been able to, had he grown up in the era that I did, where I would have just had to take out an encyclopedia to get information. For example, he had begun teaching himself university-level calculus by the time he was in Year 10, by learning through YouTube clips and watching Neil deGrasse Tyson talking about astrophysics. From this, he was able to see that he is intelligent, that he does have interests and that he is engaged with things in the world. But he wasn’t able to pass Year 12 because he wasn’t able to write an essay on Shakespeare.

In what ways do you believe teachers can be equipped to better support neurodivergent students, particularly when it comes to reading and engaging with stories?

A message that I am really hoping to get across over my two years as Laureate is that there’s often too much expected of our teachers. Not only are they expected to work with kids who may struggle with reading, but there might be a child whose parents have just separated, and there might be child who hasn’t had breakfast or a child who has just lost a grandparent. Every classroom is going to be full of children with different needs. So, the number one thing that all the teachers whom I’ve spoken to have told me is that they need a lower student-to-adult ratio. They need more support in the classroom to be able to give children the individual attention they need.

That support might be literacy experts, it might be mental health support, potentially. I know of one school who had engaged a social worker. There might be all kinds of community support that we can bring into schools so that we’re not expecting teachers to be everything for every child. We also need to recognise as parents that, in the end, we are our child’s most important advocate, and so we are the one who is going to be the communication line with the teachers. This means understanding that teachers are juggling a lot of different needs and that your child is not the only child in the classroom. It also means thinking about how you and their teacher can work together to better support a child and seeing yourself as a team with the teacher.

What do you consider the biggest challenge in getting children interested in reading currently, and how do you think it should be addressed?

I think there are a few challenges. Insisting on what our children should read can be problematic, because ideally we should want children to be able to choose their own reading matter in the same way that we’re allowed to. So, I think helping kids find things that they’re interested in reading is a really great way to encourage it. This could be cookbooks, gardening books or car manuals. 

The Grattan Report (2024) also recognised that there have been teaching reading methods that don’t work for all children, moreso that around one-third of kids leave primary school with reading skills that won’t set them up for adult life. It recognised that language needs to be broken down into a code and put back together again. The premise of this being that once we have reached a certain level of reading where we can no longer read by memorising, we instead begin to understand how letters placed together form sounds and those sounds when placed together form words which we may not have previously read. It’s really exciting that this might prompt an overhaul in our education system and hopefully mean that all children will get the teaching they need.

With some school libraries experiencing budget and staffing reductions in 2024, as well as some being dissolved into classroom libraries, do you believe libraries and librarians retain a crucial role in a digital era? If so, what role do you envision for them?

Libraries and librarians are vital. I know for all my children, even my youngest son, who wasn’t a reader, that libraries are a safe space. Libraries are a place where children who may struggle in the classroom or in the playground can go. Librarians are neutral and are not usually their classroom teachers.

I remember my sons would come home from high school and describe the librarians as having a magical ability to know exactly the book that they’d want to read next. The fact that librarians can have these individual connections with students can be an extraordinary support for kids who may find school a challenge.

We also keep talking about the importance of children growing up in households full of books, but not all households are going to be able to afford to buy books. So, the number one thing that we need to do is to support school and public libraries so that children can have access to books.