This blog was written by Deepali Agarwal, Room to Read India.

Conversations around education, inclusion and equity at the UKFIET 2025 Conference often circled back to a familiar question that remains urgent: how do we centre each child’s experience in education systems? At the panels and presentations I attended within the ‘Inclusion and Intersectionality’ theme, researchers and practitioners from across the world spoke of bringing children from the margins into the mainstream – whether these are those affected by war and displacement or those excluded due to their class, religion, gender or disability. At various instances, it struck me how little space we were able to give to children’s literature and libraries in these conversations. Why so, when it remains well-documented and researched that books, reading and stories have profound potential to nurture inclusion and belonging in children…

When we talk about the stigma, isolation and doubt that comes with disability, and the personal and systemic neglect faced by teachers and children with disabilities, can we tap into what it means for a child to read or listen to a story and see themselves reflected; their troubles affirmed? When we talk about exploration and agency as being the strongest predictors of meaningful learning, can we see ways of nurturing these through stories and their protagonists?

These are just two examples where children’s literature can make meaningful contributions to education and inclusion. Well-curated libraries, especially if designed for underserved contexts, are so much more than a collection of books. They can provide safe and stimulating spaces for children to meet each other, form community, and experience joy and curiosity. To enable this, we need to look at the big picture of literacy, including people’s home languages, embracing multi-lingual contexts, welcoming all kinds of people in the library. Because reading for pleasure, often dismissed as extracurricular, is in fact an equity issue.

Access to rich and engaging literature at home is a severe gap for Global South populations, with studies suggesting that access to children’s literature in India is limited to 1 book available for 5 children in urban areas, and 1 book available for every 11 children in rural areas. In severe contrast, in the UK, around 91% of children and young people aged 8-18 had a book of their own at home in 2024. So when studies from the OECD and other organisations repeatedly show that children who own books are not only more likely to read for pleasure, but also demonstrate higher attainment in language, better mental wellbeing and greater social mobility over time – it tells us that books for children are not a ‘bad buy’. In fact, reading and access to books is a child’s right; we need to view them as reframing classroom learning, instead of merely supplementing it.

As education systems increasingly grapple with questions of ethics and the future of learning in the face of technology and AI expansion, it becomes even more critical to keep the human experience at the centre, and it is literature that reminds us of what it means to be human – to feel, imagine and be able to communicate with others. Children’s books may not always appear explicitly in education policy frameworks, or feature in assessment and data metrics, but their absence is telling! If inclusion in education is to move beyond infrastructure and enrolment, then libraries and literature must take their rightful place within these conversations.

At Room to Read, the hope is simple: that children everywhere, and especially in areas underserved or remote, can find in their libraries books that contain images of their lives and books that let them see the world outside of their own.