Research Project
Social Reading Spaces
The Social Reading Spaces research study, a collaboration between the School Library Association, Farshore and HarperCollins Children's Books, was a longitudinal 12-week trial of a social book club aimed at disengaged readers in Year 8. The study, which took place over 12 weeks between October 2024 and February 2025, trialled an innovative new approach to book clubs.
17 school libraries run by SLA members across the UK, from the Shetlands to Torquay, hosted social book clubs with no expectation or pressure on the children and young people who attended to read, instead aiming to foster conversations and book talk in a relaxed and pressure-free setting.
The study found that through offering space and time to engage with appealing resources, young people will be more motivated to read. Many children see reading as a chore associated with the pressure of lessons and assessment. This research study found lifting the pressure and offering wide and free choice are important for motivating young people to engage with reading.
The study demonstrated the social, emotional and academic benefits of the relaxed book clubs, however staffing levels and timetabling posed significant challenges to running the sessions. The findings highlighted lack of resource as a major obstacle, with school librarians needing significant senior leadership support for adopting the Social Reading Spaces approach to reading intervention.
We would like school librarians, and indeed all those who work to support and encourage young readers, to be able to use the evidence from this study to gain the necessary support for running similar book groups. Therefore, we have developed a set of resources to provide you with the information and ideas needed to run a Social Reading Spaces-style book club and to help you advocate for time and investment to engage those young people in your school who might otherwise be hard to reach. We have used feedback from the pupils and librarians involved to inform the resources available on this page, with all the suggestions drawn from our learnings.
We are building on the learnings from the Social Reading Spaces study in our Reading Reboot programme - a reading programme funded by the Charlotte Aitken Trust.