Children’s Book Project

With our community book gifting projects ongoing, it’s lovely to get feedback, so I wanted to share our latest feedback from the Children’s Book Project:

“With your help we are more than proud to have gifted 1,035,412 books to babies and children aged 0-14 years and to have supported 828 schools, prisons and other organisations through our gifting events. We also piloted a highly successful ‘Books at Breakfast’ scheme in conjunction with Magic Breakfast. As one teacher said “a child that struggles to read in class has found that having books in their breakfast club to read whilst eating has hugely boosted their reading confidence.” 58% of the 254,000 children we reached over the 2025/26 academic year come from households with an annual income of less than £7,400, so without the generosity of organisations such as Eco-Able these children just would not have the opportunity to choose books that interest them to take home and keep.”

With the support from our funders, we were able to contribute 600 brand new books to the Children’s Book Project for their various projects across the country.

Feedback from schools

“Your books have played such a special role this year. They’ve enabled us to engage parents with reading workshops, enabled children to take home books to share… The response has been overwhelmingly positive and sparked real enthusiasm for reading amongst our pupils.”

“Rather than seeing books as something linked to school, they view them as something personal and enjoyable. Giving children ownership and choice helped create excitement around reading and encouraged them to see themselves as readers.”

From the Head Teacher at St Paul’s Way Primary, E3:

“At St Paul’s Way Primary, we have a thriving reading culture, but however well-stocked our library is, borrowing books can never replace the value of owning them. The quality and quantity of books we receive is incredible and enables us to give our children at least two books to keep every term. Pupils at our school are able to see book ownership for what it is – an entitlement.

We’ve been running the project for a year. At first, many children were amazed they could keep the books, often asking, “It’s for me? I can really have it at home?” Over time, that surprise has turned into pride. Children now tell us things like, “I have a bookshelf with all my books on it now—it’s getting bigger and bigger!” The reading we value most is volitional, and there is nothing more empowering than giving children the freedom to choose and keep books they love….The abundance of the books, combined with the fact the deliveries always include popular and contemporary titles, turns the choosing of books into a spectacle. The excitement that this engenders spills over into wider engagement and does so much of the ‘heavy lifting’ for us in terms of supporting a love of reading. It also shows our children that when we say we care about their enjoyment of books, we truly mean it.

Nationally, around 10% of children in the UK have no books at home. We can say with confidence that this is not the case for children at St Paul’s Way Primary. Thank you, Children’s Book Project!”

Reasons why book gifting is so important (especially this year in the year of Reading):

• One in three disadvantaged children across the UK has fewer than ten books of their own at home (NLT 2022)
• One in ten has none (CBP)
• Book ownership has been directly linked with improved mental health amongst children (CBP)
• Book ownership has been linked to a greater propensity to read for pleasure (CBP)
• Reading fluency itself has a significant impact on children’s successful progression through education (CBP)
• By age eleven, there is a 12-month language development gap between children from book rich homes books and those with fewer than ten books (NLT 2022)

Call to action

Sometimes we take for granted the things that we’ve always had in life, and reading has always been a go to for me. Being able to help children across the country have books of their own is such an important project and the Children’s Book Project do such an important job in bridging the gap and helping children have access to books, which they would not get otherwise. We hope to do a further number of books for CBP and would love you to get involved!

To find out more information about out our ‘books for communities’ projects, click on the highlighted text to see what other projects we’re working on. To get involved please contact us at info@eco-able.co.uk