Is it time for World Book Day to ditch the fancy dress?

If you’ve stepped into a supermarket recently, you may have noticed the annual explosion of brightness and color on the clothing racks, which can only mean one thing: World Book Day is upon us again. A Very Hungry Caterpillar costume that will have your toddler out of shape by next year, both physically and intellectually? It will be £17. A costume from that famous novel Toy Story? It could cost you £15 if you buy at full price.

It is not surprising that now, now, this worthwhile effort to encourage reading, to foster laughter. That’s not because World Book Day’s mission to promote books among young people isn’t laudable: it’s hard to think of a better habit than reading for our children. Every year, 15 million book tokens are sent to children to buy one of the titles published specially for World Book Day or to get £1 off another book. But somewhere over the years since UNESCO created this laudable event in 1995, the cosplay element seems to have taken over. And the parents’ loss is, as always, Amazon’s gain.

Katie Roberton from Bournemouth is an artist, but just like the non-artists out there, she balks at the idea of ​​wearing an elaborate Willy Wonka costume once and throwing it away. And so, like many, she has resorted to buying outfits online for her son, who is now 12.

“It’s a waste of money,” she says. “I have to go straight to Amazon and buy complete rubbish that will be worn once and then luking in the wardrobe for three years. We already have enough in the house.”

In these difficult times in particular, she believes it puts too much financial pressure on parents: “I don’t have the money, I’m struggling a lot at the moment, but I’ll still buy something if I have to,” she said. say. “My son would feel like an idiot if he wasn’t dressed up.”

She prefers the idea, which some schools are implementing this year, of inviting children to come dressed in comfortable clothes instead.

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Felicity Hannah, Radio 4’s presenter Live Cash Box, among those whose children’s schools have gone in this direction. “Because of the cost of living, instead of coming to school in costume, there is a Be Comfy and Read day,” her son’s school told parents. “I love it!” Hannah wrote on Twitter/X. “The MONEY that the parents will save and the WASTE that will be avoided.”

Roberton, founder of ceramics business Outlandish Creations, agrees that this would be better. “I think it was better when parents didn’t have to buy an outfit for any occasion, whether it was leaving kindergarten or the school prom,” she says.

It’s hard to pinpoint exactly when World Book Day, first introduced in the UK and Ireland in 1997, went from a celebration of reading to the mainstreaming of Marvel superhero costumes. Because while the national dress-up is the part that brings joy to children, it’s also the part that makes parents despair – and it could be argued that it comes from the value of the day itself.

In 2020 alone, over a million £1 books were donated in the UK and Ireland in just five weeks. Among children receiving free school meals, more than one in five said the book they bought with their World Book Day items was the first book they owned. 66 percent of primary school teachers said that World Book Day had changed their reading habits. In short, it makes a difference.

As Helen Tamblyn-Saville, owner of Wonderland Bookshop in Retford, Nottinghamshire, puts it, encouraging children to love reading is one of the most important things you can do for them. “Books can change lives,” she says. “But I understand 100 percent why people are afraid of the whole dressing up thing [of World Book Day]. It sometimes feels like the dressing up feature preceded a great day of reading.”

Tamblyn-Saville is part of the World Book Day strategic advisory group but insists that while costumes can be part of the celebration, they are not “the main purpose”.

She also points out that most of the characters in children’s books are children wearing everyday clothes. As with adults in books – it may also be more difficult for teachers, who are often pressured to participate. Sue Bordley, English teacher and author of books including Have Fun, Be Safethat she previously entered the middle school where she works wearing a floral dress on World Book Day and claimed to be Curley’s wife from Pig and Men. “I’ve done it in the least ‘do it’ way I can,” she admits. “Some colleagues came in like Harry Potter or Miss Trunchbull [from Roald Dahl’s Matilda]but that’s not for me.”

There is also a growing realization that dressing up is also frustrating for some children, and worse, upsetting. Bordley says her own children, now aged 16 and 14, don’t like to dress up, so she would always think of dressing them as book characters who wore school uniforms or jeans and a t-shirt. previously held on World Book Days.

“For a lot of kids, it’s not really fun,” she says.

The difficulty with dressing up for World Book Day is that people tend to work backwards from the outfit, rather than having the book as the starting point, says Elaine Adams, co-founder and chief executive of Helped Reading for Children (ARCh). Oxfordshire revealed.

At the moment, sometimes it can be, instead, more about what happens to families in the dressing up box, she is afraid. “People think, ‘I’ve got one of these, will I?’ rather than thinking about the book or the story,” she says. “It’s such an opportunity to highlight books and stories, and it seems to be missed, and not hit the nail on the head.”