Submission to Reading for Pleasure Inquiry - evidence from custodial settings (RFP0165)

This submission to the UK Parliament Education Committee’s Reading for Pleasure Inquiry presents evidence from an ongoing research programme examining reading for pleasure in custodial settings. It argues that prisons, while outside the inquiry’s primary focus on early years and schools, offer a critical lens through which to understand long-term reading disengagement and the conditions required to rebuild reading motivation in adulthood. Drawing on prior prison-based reading initiatives and a forthcoming large-scale digital rollout across more than ninety prisons in England and Wales (subject to final Ministry of Justice approval), the project examines reading for pleasure as a behavioural process rather than solely an attitudinal outcome.The submission identifies four enabling conditions for restoring reading engagement: access, autonomy, relevance, and creative extension. It outlines a digitally delivered, self-paced reading-and-writing model designed to generate large-scale behavioural evidence on voluntary uptake, sustained engagement, and progression across reading levels. The evidence positions custodial settings as a legitimate and informative site for national literacy policy, arguing that reading for pleasure should be recognised as a lifelong practice extending beyond childhood. The submission calls for policy recognition of prisons within reading-for-pleasure frameworks, endorsement of autonomous digital provision, and support for ethical national data generation on adult reading engagement.