Joanne McCaffery, the principal of Tattygar Primary School in Lisbellaw, was a visiting speaker this week in the English Department’s Subject Application classes.  Her topic was ‘Reading for Pleasure’, and this event took place in conjunction with the launch of The UK’s National Year of Reading 2026, a major campaign led by the National Literacy Trust (NLT) and the Department for Education which aims to reignite a love for reading across all ages by connecting it with personal passions like music, sports, and food, under the slogan “Go All In”.

The campaign hopes to encourage reading in diverse formats – everything from print books to audiobooks to fan fiction. Launched in January 2026, the initiative features a range of events, partnerships with cultural icons, and aims to make reading vibrant and accessible, supporting existing literacy efforts with new resources and approaches.

Joanne McCaffrey’s talk built on the themes of this campaign by explaining to English students the obligation they are under to ‘redefine the very notion of who is a reader’ in order to enable young people to see themselves as readers.

                Young people are very susceptible to seeing themselves in exactly the way

                you, the teacher, the one adult they spend most of their day with, in exactly the way

                you view them.  We must appreciate the great deal of non-traditional reading these

                children do already – and then build on that to scaffold them into more challenging

                texts.

However, at the heart of her talk was the idea that reading needs to be volitional, pleasurable, engaging and – dare we say it – fun. 

                The curriculum makes clear that we are to cultivate a genuine love of reading in children.

                That’s a very subtle, difficult task – and it can’t be done through comprehension tests.

Students commented afterwards on how much they enjoyed the talk due to Joanne McCaffrey’s boundless enthusiasm for the subject and the way she drew on years of classroom experience to outline very practical structured and informal approaches that can be undertaken with children to promote a wholly positive view of reading.

McCaffrey has completed research in this area as a Masters student at St Mary’s.  She  wrote a dissertation under the supervision of Dr Matthew Martin entitled “Exploring the Value of Reading for Pleasure in the Northern Ireland Curriculum: Policy, Practice, and Perceptions” and is now continuing to pursue her research in this area.