Marcus Rashford’s ambitious new scheme hopes to encourage children to fall in love with reading
Footballer by day, superhero by night, Marcus Rashford is now hoping to help youngsters get into reading, as well as feeding them.
The Manchester United player will be working with Macmillan Children’s Books (MCB) to promote reading and literacy to schoolchildren. “I only started reading at 17, and it completely changed my outlook and mentality,” the footballer wrote in a statement on Twitter, “I just wish I was offered the opportunity to really engage in reading more as a child, but books were never a thing we could budget for as a family when we needed to put food on the table.”
In 2019, The National Literacy Trust (NLT) reported the daily reading levels of young people in the UK (aged 9 to 18) were the lowest they had ever recorded; just 25.8% of children read daily in their free time. According to the NLT, the pandemic only accelerated the literary crisis and the literacy engagement gap between girls and boys worsened dramatically over lockdown. The gap was at 2.3 percentage points at the beginning of 2020 and has since increased to 11.5 percentage points.
Rashford and MCB’s scheme will see a large number of books being given away to children from vulnerable and underprivileged backgrounds, even, the player writes, “if I have to deliver them myself.” The Marcus Rashford Book Club will be a reader recommends programme, publishing and championing works of creatives from all backgrounds. The book club hopes to publish work featuring characters that represent all children.
Reading has been proven to help all-round performance in the classroom (NLT), yet 1 in 11 disadvantaged children in the UK say they don’t own a single book of their own. Children who enjoy reading are also three times more likely to have good mental wellbeing than children who don’t; the benefits are unequivocal.
In May 2021, Macmillan will publish Rashford’s first book You Are A Champion: Unlock Your Potential, Find Your Voice and Be The BEST You Can Be. The book aims to show young people aged 11-16 how to navigate adversity, with anecdotes from Rashford’s life. The book will be co-created with Carl Anka, a journalist for sports media group The Athletic, and Katie Warriner, a leading performance psychologist and co-founder of the Prime Clinic.
In the past, initiatives to decrease the gender reading gap have often focused on gender-specific books with “boy-ish” characters and storylines. Enforcing these stereotypes only alienates any children who don’t relate to their gender-specific protagonist. The impact of seeing a footballer champion reading will likely have a far more monumental impact on young boys.
Rashford follows in the footsteps of grime artist Stormzy, who launched #Merky Books, a publishing imprint within Penguin Random House in 2018. The publishing house is a home for underrepresented voices and runs multiple new writer awards and opportunities.
Stormzy and Rashford are two influential young men who thousands of boys across the country look up to. As a footballer and a rapper, they defy the traditional image of a keen reader or bookworm; their involvement within the publishing industry will teach young boys that books and reading are for everyone, and hopefully work to close the gender reading gap.
Like any successful superhero, Rashford’s philanthropic efforts are supported by a loyal sidekick. Earlier this year, the footballer was personally recruited by Jay-Z for his PR agency Roc Nation. Rashford’s personal publicist Kelly Hogarth, who had been working with the player for a year previously, joined Roc Nation a few months before Rashford as Director of Brand Strategy & Business Communications. Hogarth has played an integral role in Rashford’s off-pitch initiatives, such as the free meals during school holidays scheme the football player successfully campaigned for a few weeks ago.
The player and PR duo seem to be on a mission to take over the world, and it seems the world will be a much better place for it.