Top Takeaways

The Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge is the UK’s biggest children’s reading programme. This year it leans into rhythm with an inspiring title: ‘Read to the Beat’. In 2024, over 580,000 children participated; 13.4 million books were borrowed including audio and e-books; 90% of UK library authorities took part; 95% of participating children now read at least once a week.

This initiative introduces children to books about music, including drumming and the joy of making music together. These books will spark imaginations, and inspire many children to play musical instruments, to sing and to move to the beat. There’s also a special rhythm inside reading itself which allows children to anticipate what’s coming up next in their reading and makes the text all the more magnetic.

The rhythm of reading flows beneath the words for most readers, without anyone really noticing. But for those readers, who are not yet fluent and not able to enjoy their reading, their sensitivity to rhythm needs a boost and this is something that schools can offer.

A summer like no other: Why Read to the Beat Matters

During the summer months thousands of people gather together at well known music festivals and also at smaller ones in local parks. Emeritus Professor of Anthropology at University of California, Santa Barbara, Brian Fagan described how hunter gatherers have traditionally congregated in very large groups during the summer to trade, to celebrate new partnerships and to affirm long standing bonds of trust and friendship. Music is well-known for its effect of strengthening bonds between people and it’s a logical possibility that these summer gatherings involved music, dance and storytelling.

I cheered when I saw that The Reading Agency’s Summer Reading Challenge, delivered with public libraries and powered by Universal Music Group UK, had chosen music and rhythm as its 2026 theme.

The number of children visiting their local libraries, each one celebrating a Summer of Reading, points to the enormous success of this programme. As I write, in early August, the Read to the Beat website reports that more than two million books have been read.

Building the theme around rhythm and sound, the selectors have ensured that there are books to captivate children at the earliest stages of reading development, and those who are already enjoying independent reading. There are 55 titles to choose from across a lovely range of genres. The rising popularity of graphic novels is reflected in the list, as are dyslexia-friendly books.

Perhaps the most interesting are the picture books. There’s a rich relationship between the vibrant qualities of images and sounds. Collaborators, such as Satie with Picasso, Stravinsky with Matisse (among others), and Schoenberg with Kandinsky have shared an interest in the vibrancy of form and colour in one another’s work as the modern era took shape. Picture books about music are well-placed to portray the colours, patterns, waves, textures and contrasts of music, and to celebrate its life-affirming energy, page after page. Picture books are structured with exceptional rigour. The words themselves might be sparse, but their rhythm is poetic.

The Summer Reading Challenge meets children on the page in a book that they choose for themselves. That might be fiction or non-fiction. It might have audio cues or rich, vibrant illustrations, or both. The breadth of choice is the exciting part. In fact, children often tell me how much they enjoy choosing a new book from a selection that includes books that are too easy, too hard, and just right. It seems that the so-called ‘Goldilocks zone’ expands when it comes to choosing a book. When I speak to children about reading, they tell me that they prefer to challenge themselves when they want to read a particular book.

What the Summer Reading Challenge gets right

Summer offers children a chance to 'rewild' after almost eleven months in the classroom. For some children there are long weeks with grandparents, far away from their school friends. Others are travelling with parents on exciting holidays. For those fortunate enough to live near a library, this is something of an oasis in the middle of each overheated urban area. Libraries are cool. They are full of friendly people and they are packed with brilliant books. There are bonuses too: storytelling, comfortable places to read, and colourful displays make libraries even more magnetic to children.

In my opinion, the beginning of the new term is far less daunting if children have taken part in the Summer Reading Challenge. In September, the children with a collection of Summer Reading Challenge badges and a strong sense of achievement that comes with finishing several books, will begin the new school year ready for their next challenge. In other words, they are ready to buckle up and get started. They have expanded their identities as readers and they’re ready, not just for more reading, but for more learning and more expansion. They are intrinsically motivated.

The real reason behind this is that children set their own goals during the Summer Reading Challenge. Nobody sets the target for them. That matters more than it sounds, because a goal you have chosen yourself is one you can believe yourself capable of reaching, and that belief is built by reaching it, not by being told about it.

The idea that self-belief can develop in a library is not fanciful, but anchored in process. Children set their own reading goals, select the books that interest them and then read them. Moving closer to realising their reading goal, day after day, week after week, is similar to working towards a musical performance. It takes daily practice, and the practice is invisible until that one day when it isn't. What a child learns is not simply that they have finished six books. It is that they are someone who finishes what they start.

The rhythm inside reading

Perhaps at this point, you are saying, but what about the children who are not yet reading well, those without fluency in their reading, those stuck on individual words and those who read without absorbing the meaning of the phrases and sentences?

Like you, I am thinking about these children too. I am imagining how they feel as they sit in front of their new teacher in September - or even in August in certain parts of the UK. For me, it’s personal. I was once that child. My parents took me to our library (which I adored) but I did not understand what I was reading. The meaning of the words did not spring off the page into my mind. They were dark lifeless shapes, with rivers of white wriggling around them. It was not until I had learned to play a musical instrument that the rhythm of reading ignited. The change was sudden, like flipping a switch and the meaning flowed as I read.

This is why I believe that this campaign, ‘Read to the Beat’ has so much potential to change lives. If children are inspired to take up a musical instrument, then perhaps they will have a wonderful teacher who knows what to do to help them find the rhythm of reading. On the other hand, I have built a 30 week CPD programme for primary school teachers that targets the rhythm of reading as the main focus. This supplements and extends the phonics programme a school already uses.

‘Read to the Beat’ celebrates books about musicians, soundscapes, the science of sound and the wonder of musical journeys. If teachers feel inspired by these amazing books, Rhythm for Reading offers a possible ‘next step’. It’s a step into inclusive practice.

I will never forget the feeling of relief when I discovered (at age eleven) that I could read properly after all. Some children need a different approach. That was true almost 50 years ago and it is certainly true today. Indeed, the Reading Agency’s announcement of this year's theme stated that one in four children are unable to read well by the age of eleven.

Five rhythm-related blocks to reading

Let’s unpack this. Children who benefit from a rhythm-based approach are dealing with these five rhythm-related blocks to their learning:

1. Vigilant attention, meaning they are not relaxed enough to anticipate what is coming up next in their reading, or to follow their teacher’s directions.

2. Lack of precision at the front edge of consonants, and possible conflation of vowel sounds, meaning they confuse words and guess what is happening around them (and guessing words when reading).

3. Reading is stuck at the word-by-word level (once described as ‘barking at print’), meaning that the children are not able to experience the connections or relationships between words.

4. Reading fluency is not yet flowing across phrases and sentences, meaning that the child is either hesitating between words, or reading too quickly, without expression or assimilating meaning.

5. Reading comprehension is not monitored as the child reads and the text is not understood, meaning that the child does not correct nonsensical errors, nor anticipate what is coming up next and select appropriate word candidates.

What the research shows about rhythm and reading

The importance of sensitivity to rhythm for reading development is not a new idea. M.A.K. Halliday wrote about the role of rhythm in grammatical structures in 1985 and in 2007, David and colleagues showed that children’s rhythm production at age 6 predicted later reading skills at age 10. Even though rhythm might appear rather abstract as a concept, every teacher knows that, in poetry, music and storytelling, the rhythm in a teacher’s expressive voice creates the most magical of classroom experiences for the children.

More than half a million children a year take part in the Summer Reading Challenge. They are reading about rhythm and music in local community libraries all around the UK. The beat goes on through the summer and all the while, children are becoming more empowered as readers as they reach their reading goals. This is a beautiful opportunity to build sensitivity to rhythm among the children who are lagging behind in their reading, without adding to teachers’ workload (and it’s fun) for the schools looking to broaden and build their inclusive approaches.

They read every day. Nothing changed

In schools, there are many diligent children who practise reading every day with their parents, as though reading were a simple matter of accurate decoding. It's like a one-way conversation in which the speaker tries to communicate every day, but there is never an answer from the other person. These children have read their books and received stickers for doing so. In the classroom they put up their hands when their teacher asks the whole class, "Who read more than five books?"

They do not, however, raise their hands when their teacher asks, "Who read more than ten books?"

The children whose hands go up at ten have read more than ten books because they are intrinsically motivated by reading. The stickers are not what drives them; reading expands their lives, their sense of who they are and who they are becoming. They are hooked on the experience of reading for its own sake.

The intrinsic rewards of reading only appear when the rhythm of reading is already in position. It’s a necessary piece of the reading equation. I'd argue that the × in the Simple View of Reading is doing more work than we credit. In my opinion, it's the part that holds decoding skills and language skills in alignment with each other. Perhaps we could read it as 'timing' rather than 'times'.

Your school, this term: Spotting a rhythm-related block

So, if reading five books was 'good' and reading ten books was 'great', the Summer Reading Challenge shows teachers what they need to know at the start of the term. There’s capacity to move diligent children from ‘good’ to ‘great’. There's also an opportunity to tend to the children who read nothing at all during the summer, and to ignite their interest as a matter of urgency. Even though ‘Read to the Beat’ can spark interest in rhythm and music, it was never designed to resolve a rhythm-related reading block.

In my experience, children with rhythm-related blocks often find more than reading affected; following what is happening in the classroom can be difficult too. When the rhythm-related block resolves, the child experiences relief and clarity in several aspects of learning at the same time. Of course each child is unique in the way a rhythm-related block affects their reading development. A teacher with an acute ear will tend to these idiosyncrasies in reading as a matter of priority, listening for the gaps in phonemic awareness, the areas that are more effortful and any collapsing or fragmenting of focus. This is intuitive and more an art than a science, but all these details could be easily recorded. I’ve created a Reading Fluency Tracker for this purpose. It’s free and I’ve created a 30 minute training to get teachers started. Download the Reading Fluency Tracker.

Rhythm for Reading Online CPD: The next step

My Rhythm for Reading Online CPD programme is open! It’s a 30 week programme for teachers. Each term, teachers deliver one session of Rhythm for Reading per week and receive 15 minutes of one-to-one mentoring from me.

Teachers begin with no knowledge of rhythm-based reading intervention and complete the programme at the end of term 3, able to adapt it for children with SEND. The programme targets those children who are not meeting expectation in reading.

Here’s an example: One child made 25 months of progress in reading comprehension, and said,

“My reading's got better. I've been practising more and it's more interesting.”

Her Year 3 teacher said,

“Showing enjoyment of reading. Improved sentence structure in writing.”

The children who can decode, but do not yet understand what they read, often make more than a year of progress in reading comprehension age - sometimes much more - from just 100 minutes out of the classroom (but during the training itself, allow around 300 minutes in Term 1, because the co-taught sessions run longer).

The booking period is open now and closes at the end of September. The start dates are w/b 24th August, 7th September, 21st September.

Current price £295.00 per teacher

See the CPD Programme to read more.

Rhythm for Reading Online CPD - Your questions answered

Who is the CPD actually for?

Teachers and teaching assistants who work with lower-attaining readers. No musical training is needed. Teachers start with no prior experience of teaching music.

How much time does it take — for teachers, and for children?

When the training is completed, the programme only requires ten weekly sessions of ten minutes. That's 100 minutes out of the classroom in total, in small groups of 5–10. During the CPD training, the sessions are longer (allow 30 minutes) as they involve co-teaching with a video. There is also a weekly 15-minute coaching call, across three terms.

Does this replace phonics?

No. Rhythm for Reading builds on the phonics you already teach. It supports the fluent reading that phonics is meant to lead to, particularly for children in whom that step hasn't yet happened.

Which children benefit most?

Children who can already decode but aren't yet reading with understanding tend to see the largest gains in reading comprehension. Children with weaker starting points often show their biggest gains in phonological awareness instead.

When does it start, and when do doors close?

Doors open at beginning of August and close at the end of September. Three start dates: w/b 24 August, 7 September and 21 September. The earliest date suits schools already back, including those in Scotland.

What if I want to try something first?

The Reading Fluency Tracker is free, takes five minutes per pupil, and has a complimentary thirty minute group training. It's a way to see whether this way of ‘noticing’ tells you something useful about your readers before committing to anything.

Is there research behind this?

Yes! A five year research project was undertaken at UCL Institute of Education, to investigate the effects of the intervention on reading behaviour. The final set of findings involving delivery of the programme by teachers has been through peer review and published in Research Studies in Music Education.

REFERENCES

David, D., Wade-Woolley, L., Kirby, J. R. & Smithrim, K. (2007). Rhythm and reading development in school-age children: a longitudinal study. Journal of Research in Reading, 30(2), 169–183.

Fagan, B. (2010) Cro-Magnon: How The Ice Age Gave Birth To The First Modern Humans , Bloomsbury Press, New York.

Halliday, M. A. K. (1985). An Introduction to Functional Grammar (1st ed.). London: Edward Arnold.

The Reading Agency, 9 October 2025, partnership announcement — https://readingagency.org.uk/the-reading-agency-partners-with-universal-music-group-uk-for-summer-reading-challenge-2026-read-to-the-beat/

Read to the Beat, Summer Reading Challenge, https://summerreadingchallenge.org.uk/news/general/get_ready_for_read_to_the_beat_2026