Sunday Times Get Britain Reading
In October 2025, The Sunday Times launched their ‘Get Britain Reading’ campaign featuring Coram Beanstalk and BookbanksUK as their charity partners.
The national campaign addresses the growing reading-for-pleasure crisis in the UK affecting both children and adults by aiming to reignite a love of reading for pleasure, highlighting evidence that reading is strongly linked to improved wellbeing, happiness, academic achievement, and social connection.
Supported by high-profile authors and celebrities such as Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie, Salman Rushdie, J.K. Rowling, Michael Morpurgo, Jacqueline Wilson, Philip Pullman, Quentin Blake, Marian Keyes, Jamie Oliver, and Dolly Parton, among others, the campaign focuses on three practical actions, encouraging the public to:
- Pledge to read for pleasure for at least 10 minutes a day for six weeks
- Donate to Bookbanks, helping place books in food banks so families experiencing poverty can own books
- Volunteer with Coram Beanstalk to read with children in primary schools
Readers who signed up to the Get Britain Reading newsletter received curated reading tips, book recommendations, and encouragement via a six‑week email programme, reinforced by ongoing coverage in The Sunday Times and The Times.
To celebrate World Book Day The Sunday Times published a special one-off edition of ‘The Funday Times’ for children after a 20 year hiatus!
Children’s author and comic author Jamie Smart designed the front cover and featured extracts from new books, including Katie Kirby’s soon-to-be-published The Seriously Epic Holiday of Lottie Brooks, World Book Day’s new Roald Dahl-inspired adventure Chaos At The Chocolate Factory, and a new poem by children’s author and poet and Coram Beanstalk ambassador, Rashmi Sirdeshpande. In addition, another Coram Beanstalk ambassador, Michael Morpurgo has written the first line of a short story competition, while Matt Oldfield an ex-Beanstalk reading helper volunteer himself, who wrote the Unbelievable Football series, offered a guide of who look out for at this summer’s World Cup.