Campaign by Story
Helping children to love reading is crucial to developing literacy skills, wellbeing and life chances.
Reading enables children to succeed at school, helps them develop broader skills, and leads to healthier, happier lives. Read Manchester and Manchester Libraries work tirelessly to improve literacy and life chances. Through their book gifting campaign, they have delivered a huge number of books and reading resources to children in Manchester.
But there is still urgent work to be done…
- More than a quarter of pupils in Manchester leave primary school unable to read well.
- Almost half of the wards in Manchester fall in the top 10% of areas for literacy need in the whole country.
- Just 39% of children and young people in Manchester read outside class every day and a third only read when they have to.
The cost of living crisis continues. Many families have fallen into deeper poverty than ever before, and for an increasing number, new books for their children are beyond reach when food and heating are the priority and the bigger challenge. This dire situation will only worsen as winter bites.
All children need and deserve to own new books. At this time, when we know many parents cannot afford more expense, it is crucial that we support the most vulnerable local children. Working together, we can ensure that we are reaching local children and families where free new books can really improve their lives.
Working with hundreds of local organisations including schools, foodbanks, community groups, Family Hubs, refugees and youth groups, more than 423,000 books have been gifted through the book gifting campaign since early 2020.
Rainbow Surprise is a local charity offering a range of activities and services to improve community cohesion. They run holiday playscheme sessions for children aged 5-11 from deprived backgrounds and Read Manchester regularly supports them with books to gift. One parent whose children were able to choose books for Christmas last year said:
"Thank you so much for all the lovely books my children have received. I can’t afford to buy them and it made my children so happy to have books they can keep"
Manchester South Central Foodbank also benefit from gifted books. One parent said:
"This is a valuable service for many families in our community who suffer financially. Everything is so expensive now and we have lots of mouths to feed- mine are all my grandchildren living with me. Thank you"
The food bank organisers explained that they supported 332 families through their Christmas Holiday Hunger parcels last year. The books were added to the parcels which contain breakfast and lunch items to support families during the school holiday. The organisers said:
"This is an amazing project and very much appreciated by our families. Having children at home during the school holidays means having to find more food, childcare and ways to entertain children, all of which costs money. This puts pressure on household budgets making it even harder to ensure that children and families are eating well and positively engaged"
Healthy Me Healthy Communities is an organisation that gifts books from Read Manchester at their Community Grocer food pantry projects. They told us:
"We love providing books to our centre users. They are often going through financial and mental hardship and the simple act of gifting a book can bring a lot of joy and happiness. Anything that helps provide a present helps relieve parents of financial burden"
This Christmas please make a donation to support Book Gifting
Your donation will help get books to children and struggling families in Manchester who need them most during the deepening cost of living crisis. It will support Manchester's city-wide approach to building a safe, happy, healthy and successful future for all children and young people.
A donation this Christmas is more important than ever. 2026 has been designated a National Year of Reading for good reason – to address the steep decline in reading, particularly in children.
- Reading in the UK is in crisis: Only 1 in 3 children say they enjoy reading, with participation in daily reading falling to under 21%.
- Reading for pleasure is consistently linked to positive educational, social and economic outcomes.
Unlock a love of reading that lasts a lifetime - please give what you can - thank you!
- £10 could provide two books for a family struggling this Christmas
- £20 could help four children receive a book of their own to read this winter
- £30 could provide a community foodbank six books to distribute to local families