Photo: supplied
A 2020 UNICEF report found that only 64.4% of 15-year-olds in Aotearoa have more than a basic proficiency in reading and maths. Research also shows that, over the last 10 years, the proportion of young people who are reading for pleasure has decreased significantly.
Read NZ is one of the organisations trying to halt and reverse these depressing statistics.
One thing that historically gets kids to read is a wildly popular book - Harry Potter famously got 11-year-old boys reading in millions! Other famous page turners include The Hunger Games and the comedies of David Walliams.
Which suggests that one way to turn around this country's appalling literacy rates is to get more authors into our schools.
For the past six years, Read NZ's Programmes Manager Kathryn Carmody has beefed up its Writers in Schools programme, where authors spend time in classrooms answering questions about their books and offering tips to the next generation of writers.
It covers early childhood through to secondary school children.
Now Kathryn's handing the baton on to Simie Simpson who's been in the book trade for more than 20 years. Lynn Freeman invited Kathryn and Simie into the studio, where Kathryn first talked about how the programme works.
