Caxton Coffee Mornings for our Secondary School Students: Why Reading Outside the Classroom Matters Now More Than Ever

By Eve Waite, Literacy Coordinator and Teacher of History in Secondary

Earlier this year we planned a new kind of reading event in the William Caxton Library that forms part of our wider vision in Secondary for Reading for Learning and Reading for Pleasure. In collaboration with our brilliant librarians and the Science department, we invited Year 10-13 students who are interested in a career in the sciences to a subject-specific coffee morning. Our budding scientists and engineers were introduced to our non-fiction collection that includes books on a wide range of topics including medicine, genes, evolution and the periodic table. Students listened to a fascinating presentation given by Mr Jeffs and his team and were treated to coffee, teas and cake as they browsed the curated selection of books. Each student left the event with a carefully prepared reading list that Mr Jeffs, Mr Spiller and Ms Board had put together to further fuel our students’ passion for science.

This was not our first event. In June last year, we ran our first Psychology-themed coffee morning. It was Ms Brunell, Head of Psychology and Careers Lead, who came to me with a clear mission: get more Key Stage 4 and 5 students into the library to showcase the wealth of non-fiction texts that might spark their curiosity and support their future career goals. 

It is not surprising that researchers consistently find a strong correlation between students who read widely, their academic attainment and future career success. As Jonathan Douglass, CEO of the UK’s National Literacy Trust, has stated, ‘the more children read and enjoy books, the brighter their financial futures will be’. As teachers, we know that our keenest readers are often our highest achievers. We also know that it is essential for our young people to leave their textbooks to one side and engage with literature outside of the classroom if they are to access prestigious educational institutions after they finish Sixth Form, like one of the Russell Group universities in the UK or an Ivy League school in the USA. 

In our 2024 Key Stage 3 Reading Survey, our students were generally positive about their enjoyment of reading. My favourite comment was from a Year 8 student who declared, ‘reading makes me smart!’ But we must also recognise our challenges - for example, a quarter of Key Stage 3 students surveyed said that they don’t read outside of school, and we will be interested to find out what our older students tell us in our next survey later this year. The National Literacy Trust’s most recent report revealed a sharp decline in reading particularly among boys aged 14-16, and students who struggle with reading are likely to struggle in other areas academically, something that the UK Education Secretary, Bridget Phillipson, underlined recently. Initiatives like our new coffee mornings aim to address this possible decline in reading. We recognise that we must engage with our students in new and creative ways if we are to get them on board with the importance of reading.

In my view, it matters now more than ever before that we expose our students to high-quality literature, and our coffee morning series aims to do just that. The science books that our students were introduced to have been written by experts in their field and rigorously researched. They are in many ways the absolute antithesis of the sensationalist, simplistic, often misleading content that our young people are accessing on social media platforms. We live in a world of information overload where misinformation and pseudoscience are thriving, and we must show our students that they need to look in the right places if they want to find the right answers. If we don’t do this, the consequences, I believe, are very worrying indeed. Of course I do not mean that the internet is ‘bad’, and one of my hopes is that our sessions will support our students to be more thoughtful about the type of content that they want to consume online.

This is just the beginning of our project. We look forward to sharing further news about how these events develop and the types of conversations that they open up between students, teachers and parents. Our job won’t be finished until all students, regardless of their university choices, career aspirations or exam grades, declare confidently and with enthusiasm: ‘reading makes me smart!’