Nicola Davies reflects on her appointment as the Welsh Children’s Laureate

Being appointed as Children’s Laureate for Wales (the English language counter part of the older role of Bardd Plant Cymru for Welsh speaking children ) is a huge honour, and the most important job I’ve ever done in my whole career. My purpose as laureate is to try to get as many children in Wales as possible to experience the pleasure of reading and the superpower of writing.

It’s a big ask. Educational attainment measured by PISA across all subjects is lower in Wales than in any other country in the UK, and at the root of this story is poor literacy. Fewer than one in three Welsh children read for pleasure and many enter secondary school with such poor reading skills that they will struggle to access the curriculum.

This situation is neither new nor surprising. Over a quarter of Welsh children live in poverty and may have no books at home. A quarter of Welsh schools don’t have any kind of library. Without access to books, children are not going to read or write.

So one thing Bardd Plant Cymru, Sion Tomos Owen and I can do is to speak up for the vital need for both public libraries and libraries in schools, and for children’s access to books. Of course, we are not alone. The National Literacy Trust is helping to fund libraries in Welsh schools and both NLT, Books Council for Wales in in partnership with IBBY, and Booktrust Cymru, have programmes which put books into the hands of the children who need them most.

Sadly the government is not helping enough. Libraries are mandatory in prisons but not in schools and the organisations I’ve mentioned are often insufficiently and insecurely funded. So, speaking out about that is another job for us!

At the core of what Sion and I can do for children’s literacy in Wales is personal contact with children, teachers and parents. We’ve seen the impact that author visits can have in motivating children to read and inspiring them to write. So we’ll both be visiting a lot of schools, libraries and literacy festivals across Wales. Some of these visits will be based around specific projects. In my first Summer for example, my ‘Maps of Today Maps of Tomorrow’ project will help children create personal maps of their home patch- in pictures and in words- which will together become an exhibition, and a creative portrait of Wales. In my second year I’ll be inviting children to experience and write about aspects of Wales’ marine heritage – its seafaring, its wildlife and its connections to both human and animal migrations. Children’s writing will be turned into a series of songs that tell the story of Wales and the ocean. I’m hoping that these might get a public performance in a prominent location and be published as a songbook that children can perform in schools.

There are many other things I’d like to do: such as bringing a selection of the best children’s books from around the world to Welsh children in bilingual Welsh and English editions; I want to promote visual literacy too and I’ll be asking children to ‘Sketch Don’t Scroll’. Of course what I can achieve is also dependent on funding. Who knows what might be possible? For now, I’m just going to aim high and cross my fingers.

Edited and Uploaded by Rhiannon Jelley.