Discover how Bradford’s bright yellow Stories Bus is giving children free books and a lifelong love of reading.
A book of your own does a surprising amount of work. Children who have a book of their own are nearly four times more likely to say they enjoy reading, and nearly four times more likely to read every day. In England, hundreds of thousands don’t have one.
Each year, the National Literacy Trust surveys how many children own a book at home, and the picture is a mixed one. Among older children, ownership has slipped five years running. Among the youngest, it has just reached its highest level on record, which tells us this is a problem that can be moved.
The Bradford Stories Bus is one of the ways it’s being moved. This brightly colored vehicle travels from school to school in the West Yorkshire city, making sure all kids can gain access to books, regardless of their background.
The Bradford Stories Bus
The Bradford Stories Bus looks a little out of place. It’s a huge, bright yellow American school bus – the kind you’d see in an American TV show or movie, not on the street of West Yorkshire. And yet, that’s exactly where it is. It travels around the city of Bradford, delivering its precious cargo to schools across the region.
And what is this precious cargo? Well, that would be books – gifted by the National Literacy Trust in Bradford and its partner publishers as part of their efforts to get kids reading. While it looks like a mobile library, these book transactions are of the more permanent variety. Kids will be able to choose a book from the collection, take it home, and keep it.
The bus was parked at Knowleswood Primary School, on the edge of the Holme Wood estate, and for a pupil like Novayah, aged 10, that was very exciting. She likes to read at home before she goes to sleep because it relaxes her, and she reads about football and about stepping out of her comfort zone.
Hubert, also 10, was similarly impressed. His favorite part was simply seeing how many different books there were, and knowing that all of them came out of somebody’s imagination struck him as frankly shocking.
Access to Books
In 2023, the National Literacy Trust carried out a UK-wide survey of children and their reading habits. They asked young people aged eight to 18 whether they have their own book at home. Most said yes, but a significant proportion said no. In the Yorkshire and Humber region, which includes Bradford, 8% said no, the third highest figure among the nine English regions.
For children aged five to eight, the number without a book at home was even greater. 20.6% of Yorkshire and Humberside kids did not have their own book – the region was the UK’s second worst in this category.
Move forward a year, and we see the situation hasn’t gotten any better for junior and secondary school-age kids. In Yorkshire and the Humber, 10.4% of eight to 18-year-olds now said they didn’t have their own book, a significant increase.
For infant school-age kids, the situation has improved, and by more than a little. The number of the region’s five-to eight-year-olds without a book at home fell to 13.4%, a drop of more than seven percentage points in a year. While this offers a ray of hope, there is still significant work to do to keep the next generation of kids connected with the world of books and reading.
Early Encounters with Books
Laura Lee, who works as an English lead at the Primary School in Knowleswood, was full of praise for the project.
“It’s the wow factor of that bus. I saw it and thought our children would absolutely love that,” Laura said.
“The love of books starting early really helps children continue that into adulthood. It’s a skill they can use to learn, but it’s also a skill that’s nice to have to relax and enjoy yourself.”
Nabeelah Hafeez, a National Literacy Trust project manager who works aboard the bus, agreed with this.
“What we see is that even the reluctant readers are able to take so much away from this,” Nabeelah said.
“That they are able to go away with a book in their hands and read with their families and have some joy in that is what we love to do; share the joy of reading.”
Changing Habits and New Challenges
A lack of books for kids at home is not just a problem in Northern England, or in England as a whole. In fact, it’s a problem right across the world. Things are changing quickly – technology, and habits. A generation or so ago, a book was one of the few things on offer to keep a child amused on a quiet afternoon, and the resulting reading sessions would foster lifelong habits.
But these days, tablets and smartphones do the job much more quickly. Even if kids do enjoy reading, it’s difficult to compete with the immediate hit of a brightly colored digital screen, and the instant gratification it brings. Of course, adults find themselves distracted by screens too; it’s not just kids.
Books aren’t the only thing missing, either. The Trust’s research found that one in seven state primary schools in the UK had no library at all – not a poorly stocked one, none. Its Libraries for Primaries campaign funded 32 new school libraries in Bradford in a single year, distributing close to 17,000 books, many of them to schools in the most deprived parts of the district.
What Actually Helps
Not every kid is going to fall in love with reading. That’s just not how the world works. But the children in the survey who said they had no book of their own weren’t declining to read. They were being asked whether they had the option.
That’s a solvable problem, and an unusually cheap one to solve. Schools and community groups in Bradford can request a visit from the Stories Bus through the National Literacy Trust’s Bradford pages, and the Trust takes donations. Across its work in the city, it says it has reached more than 50,000 children, families and teachers and given away over 150,000 books – many to children who didn’t own a single one.
The bus, meanwhile, has kept going. It took a visible role in Bradford’s year as UK City of Culture in 2025, and in May that year it received a visit from Queen Camilla.
By making sure that children have access to books, through excellent programs like the Bradford Stories Bus, we can give every young person the chance to nurture positive habits that will last a lifetime.
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K Lou
K. Lou is a writer born in the U.S. who found her way to Japan through a spiritual calling—or, more precisely, better access to tea. She writes about travel, culture, and the occasional creative piece, inspired by her enduring love of books. This love began in high school when K. Lou carried books around to avoid seeming odd while lost in thought. Once she started reading, she never stopped. With zero regrets, she continues to explore the written word and invites others to join her in celebrating its varied forms.
