GWR and Michael Rosen launch campaign to get more young people reading
Mini libraries have opened in Reading, Exeter St Davids, Swindon, Penzance, Worcester Parkway, Didcot Parkway, Westbury, Plymouth, Truro and Gloucester
Last updated 6th Aug 2026
Children’s author Michael Rosen has said writers have got to “try harder” and create “special pleasures” from reading a book that youngsters cannot get from a screen.
On Wednesday, Rosen read his popular book We’re Going on a Bear Hunt to a small group of children on a train from London Paddington to Reading as he helped launch Great Western Railway’s campaign to encourage youngsters to keep reading during summer holidays.
The train company has added mini libraries to stations across its network after a survey of more than 1,000 parents showed their children spent an average of 11 hours before screens per week during the break from school, compared to three hours a week of reading.
It comes amid the Government’s national year of reading, which aims to tackle the decline in children and young people’s enjoyment of reading, which hit a 20-year low last year.
Rosen told the Press Association: “We are in this world. I use a screen, I type on screen, I look up information, I read things on the screen.
“The question is: are there these special pleasures and special rewards from reading a book that maybe you can’t get on a screen?”
New measures to curb the hours children spend on their devices, and protect them from online harms, were announced by the Government under Sir Keir Starmer this summer – including a social media ban for under-16s which was set to come into force by next spring.
Rosen said: “I’m not generally in favour of bans. I’m not sure that that will necessarily achieve what they would hope to achieve.
“If you forbid something, you make it desirable, so there’s a bit of a problem with that: ‘Oh, I’m being naughty. I’m looking at the screen’.
“That would have been my attitude if I was 12, I know I was that kind of kid, so that might be counter-productive.
“What I always say to other authors is we’ve got to try harder.
“We’ve got to make our books funnier, cleverer, sadder, more intriguing. We’ve got to think about why it would be fun to come to this book.
“Maybe we’ve got to make books so that they’re very performable, that would be something. Maybe we’ve got to create these special pleasures that maybe the screens can’t find.
“So, we’ve got to just try harder. That’s what I always say to myself anyway.”
He referred to the success of Dav Pilkey’s The Adventures of Captain Underpants and Dog Man books, as well as Cressida Cowell’s How to Train Your Dragon series which was turned into a film franchise.
“People want to watch the movies and read the books,” Rosen said.
“For adults, they go to see The Odyssey, what happens? The sales of The Odyssey as a book go through the ceiling.
“We have to do the same thing for children. We sometimes have to think mass media, the digital media, are doing this, how can we do stuff that relates to it, or might be a spin-off? It might be anything like that, so we’ve got to be creative.”
Mini libraries have been set up in Reading, Exeter St Davids, Swindon, Penzance, Worcester Parkway, Didcot Parkway, Westbury, Plymouth, Truro and Gloucester.
The survey behind the campaign found one in five respondents noticed their children actively struggle with words in September that they knew well at the end of the school term.
More than a quarter of parents also reported it takes an average of three to four weeks of the autumn term to get their child’s reading confidence back to pre-summer levels.
The polling of 1,002 parents of children aged four to 11 in the UK was conducted by Mortar between July 2 and 6.