How the Children's Laureate championed young literature

 Netflix, Spotify, iPads, YouTube and Instagram are just a few things that didn't exist when the Children's Laureate was set up 20 years ago.

In 1999, the main obstacle in getting children interested in reading was their own attention spans.The printed page may now have far more competition than it used to, but author Michael Morpurgo, who set up the Children's Laureate, says technology has in some ways been enormously beneficial. Children are now using the written word a great deal, they are emailing and they are texting ,And so the written word is more familiar to them to express themselves.

It may be just in a few digits. But nonetheless, they're doing that, not because it's an exercise at school, they're just getting very used to using words.However, we have a major, major problem in the millions of our children who don't become readers. And we haven't conquered that.