Research at Scottish Book Trust

Women of Words is a PhD project led by Christina Neuwirth examining systemic issues relating to the production, reception and consumption of women’s writing in Scotland. The project is a collaboration between Scottish Book Trust and the Universities of Stirling and Glasgow, funded by SGSAH.

Tackling the drop off is a PhD project led by Charlotte Webber. It seeks to understand the reasons for the drop-off in reading motivation that occurs during the teenage years using insights from young people themselves. The project is a collaboration between Scottish Book Trust and the Universities of Edinburgh and Dundee, funded by SGSSS.

Scottish Book Trust run two universal book gifting programmes – Bookbug and Read, Write, Count. Between the two programmes, every child in Scotland receives six bags of books and other resources between birth and age eight.

Bookbug has been gifting bags since 2010 and Read, Write, Count since 2016. The impact of book gifting in Scotland research project will explore the impact of the gifting programmes on the children and their families over the last 11 years.

Love to Read is a UK-wide research project which involves interviewing children aged 9–11 to understand, from their perspectives, how to inspire and sustain book reading, and then using this knowledge to co-design and evaluate an intervention.

The project is a collaboration between the University of Edinburgh, Royal Holloway, University of London, Aston University, Scottish Book Trust, Education Scotland and the National Literacy Trust, as well as an Expert Advisory Panel drawn from research, policy and practice in Scotland and England. The project is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. You can find out more on the University of Edinburgh website.

Raising the profile of authors of colour in the classroom is a research project led by Dr Melanie Ramdarshan Bold focused on the impact of school residencies led by authors of colour. The project will involve two Live Literature school residencies alongside a mentoring programme for two emerging authors of colour.

The project is a collaboration between Scottish Book Trust and the University of Glasgow, funded by the University of Glasgow.

During the early stages of the pandemic, Scottish Book Trust set out to discover what impact the lockdown was having on readers in Scotland. We recruited a panel of people living in Scotland to complete regular surveys about their experiences of reading between March and August 2020. Over the weeks we built up a picture of Scotland's reading habits under lockdown and investigated how reading influenced wellbeing and relationships.

You can read the full Reading in Scotland: reading over lockdown report and a series of short articles on the research.

Growing up a Reader is a project that aims to understand what it means to be a young reader in the 21st century. The project involves training primary and secondary school pupils to interview their peers about what they read, why, and what reading means to them to help us find out what it means to be a reader from young people's perspectives.

The project is a collaboration between Scottish Book Trust, the University of Edinburgh and the Museum of Childhood, funded by a Challenge Investment Fund grant from the University of Edinburgh. You can find out more on the Growing up a Reader website.

We are part of the LALco (Language and Literacy: Communication, collaboration, co-production) network, a multidisciplinary network that aims to connect a broad range of stakeholders from research and practice (teachers, early years' professionals, researchers, parents, policymakers, key third-sector organisations and librarians) to support the language and literacy skills that are key to the attainment and wellbeing of children and young people here in Scotland, and elsewhere.

You can find out more on the LALco website.

We are part of the EURead international research network; you can find out more on the EU Read website.