On the Reading Reboot!

I planted a flag on this blog and called it the hill I'd die on: if we take the online square away from young people, we have to fund the offline ones. If we restrict the online, we have to resource the offline at the same time.

I just found out that the School Library Association has been awarded £500,000 by the Charlotte Aitken Trust to launch Reading Reboot : a programme bringing around a thousand "social book clubs" to more than a hundred secondary school libraries across London, the West Midlands and the North East, starting with Year 8 from September 2026. This is exactly what’s needed :

• dedicated time in the actual school timetable,

• trained school librarians (the humans, not an app),

• 100+ new books for each school, and

• a free choice of what to read, with zero pressure to read at all.

Zero pressure. Free choice. : the daydreamy, wandering, choose-your-own-weird-book part of a kid's brain being handed a room and a grown-up who gets it, instead of a target. Reading as joy, not compliance, which is the exact argument my entire latest book Control Alter Delete is a very long, slightly panicked love letter to.

Credit where it's massively due: the SLA, the Charlotte Aitken Trust, and everyone who's spent years making the deeply unsexy case that school libraries and librarians are infrastructure, not decoration. (Also the excellent Rashmi who posted so it popped up on my feed as a "Good Publishing Things" — I cheered at my phone in a way that alarmed my children!)

Am I biased? Wildly. I'm currently trying to get free copies of my own book into fifty secondary school libraries, because putting real books in real hands in real rooms is the tiny, homespun version of the same instinct. But that's rather the point, this only works if loads of us shove in the same direction at once, at every scale.

So: more of this, please. Louder. Tell me the other good offline things happening, I'm collecting them now. And if you know a school in one of the pilot regions, go and be smug about their Year 8s on my behalf.

Hack the planet. Fund the library.

— K.L. Kettle. Control Alter Delete is out now from Little Tiger.