By Frank Cottrell-Boyce (author)
"Part memoir, part social history, part manifesto, this is the story of our children today. Infused with the warmth, humour and humanity of one of our most treasured storytellers, this is a call to arms."
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“We could never have loved the earth so well if we had had no childhood in it.”
George Eliot’s epigraph hangs over every page of Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s A British Childhood , a book published as his tenure as UK Children’s Laureate draws to a close. It is his first book written for adults, although for decades, whether as a novelist, screenwriter, creator of beloved children’s stories or architect of unforgettable national moments, Cottrell-Boyce has been working towards this.
Drawing on hundreds of visits to schools during his laureateship, he paints a picture of teachers increasingly acting not only as educators but as social workers, therapists, nutritionists and, even dental hygienists. The book is shaped by two defining moments in contemporary childhood - austerity and the pandemic - and by their long aftershocks. He asks: when did school stop being a place children escaped from and become a refuge they don’t want to leave?
Cottrell-Boyce has a gift for illuminating large social questions through individual stories. Individual encounters and tons of observations. What makes A British Childhood so compelling is the way books become guideposts along the journey. Each chapter takes a stage of childhood and pairs it with a story: The Very Hungry Caterpillar and early years development, The Tiger Who Came to Tea and school readiness, Just William and friendship, kinship and belonging. Children’s literature becomes both the lens and the evidence.
At the heart of the book is Cottrell-Boyce’s Reading Rights campaign, launched during his laureateship in partnership with the charity BookTrust. One statistic recurs like an alarm bell: almost half of children start school having never been read a bedtime story. An educational cost of course, but also a huge emotional cost.
Reading aloud is not just preparation for literacy; it’s an expression of love. Children who encounter books in the arms of someone who cares for them acquire what he calls an “invisible privilege” - one that shapes creativity, confidence and belonging long before formal education begins.
Again and again, the book returns to invisible forms of deprivation. Alongside food poverty furniture poverty and hygiene poverty, Cottrell-Boyce highlights the closure of public libraries, the disappearance of youth clubs and youth workers, the shrinking freedoms of childhood and the growing dominance of screens.
Despite all of this A British Childhood never despairs. Cottrell-Boyce is fundamentally interested in people making a difference. Individuals who work to make things better. We meet health visitors breaking cycles of deprivation, teachers creating transformative school cultures, librarians rebuilding communities and campaigners fighting for children’s futures.
The book’s most powerful idea is also its simplest. Reading, Cottrell-Boyce argues, is not merely about literacy. It is about connection. Shared stories create trust; trust creates community; community creates strength. The book is not the meal, it’s the recipe.
As Children’s Laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce spent two years championing reading as a right rather than a privilege. This book feels like the culmination of that mission. Tender, funny, angry and hopeful in equal measure, it is both a celebration of childhood and a warning about how fragile it has become.
I am enraged. Motivated. Inspired. Horrified. We need to protect our children. And together imagine what childhood looks like - for all children - if Britain truly prioritised children again.
A British Childhood is at once a searing account of our failure to look after the nation's most vulnerable citizens, and a call to arms to all of us to protect the innocence of childhood.
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During his time as Children's Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce visited schools that had been forced to make permanent homes in temporary buildings, where teachers doubled up as social workers, therapists and nutritionists. He talked to children abandoned within the prison system, seen to have forfeited their right to the second chance a good education might provide.
He met families shuttled from one hotel room to another as they awaited the outcome of asylum decisions. And he talked to the extraordinary array of people working to change the fortunes of the young people around them.
These encounters prompted him to reflect on his own upbringing in Merseyside, the difference literature made to his early years, and how, during his lifetime, childhood in Britain has been transformed. He shows how the connections we make and the sense of community are so vital to our future adult selves, and how, in the twenty-first century, these connections have become increasingly frayed.
Waterstones Children’s Laureate 2024–2026
A World Book Day Author 2019
Frank Cottrell-Boyce is an accomplished, successful and award-winning author and screenwriter. His books have been shortlisted for a multitude of prizes, including the Guardian Children's Fiction Prize, the Whitbread Children's Fiction Award (now the Costa Book Award) and the Roald Dahl Funny Prize and Millions , his debut children's novel, won the CILIP Carnegie Medal 2004.
Millions was was later turned into a film by Danny Boyle and it features in the Book Trust’s 100 Best Books List for 9-11 year olds.
Frank is also a successful writer of film scripts and was the official scriptwriter for the Opening Ceremony for the 2012 Olympics, playing an important role devising the ceremony with Danny Boyle. He is also a judge for the BBC Radio 2 500 Words competition. You can read a great interview with Frank and one of his fellow judge, Francesca Simon here!
He has also created a fantastic trilogy, written with his trademark wit, warmth and sense of story, based upon Ian Fleming's novel, Chitty Chitty Bang Bang, comprising Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Flies Again , Chitty Chitty Bang Bang and the Race Against Time and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang Over the Moon .
His novel The Unforgotten Coat won the 2012 Guardian Children's Fiction Prize.
On winning the prize Frank Cottrell-Boyce said: “It would be amazing to win this award with any book I'd written but it is a special joy to win it with The Unforgotten Coat, which started life not as a published book at all, but as a gift. Walker gave away thousands of copies in Liverpool - on buses, at ferry terminals, through schools, prisons and hospitals - to help promote the mighty Reader Organisation. We even had the book launch on a train. The photographs in the book, were created by my friends and neighbours - Carl Hunter and Claire Heaney. The story was based on a real incident in a school in Bootle. So everything about it comes from very close to home - even though it's a story about Xanadu! “Being shortlisted for the Guardian Prize gives you a particularly warm glow because it is awarded by a panel of your fellow authors. Past winners include my childhood heroes - Alan Garner, Leon Garfield, Joan Aiken - and contemporary heroes like Mark Haddon, Geraldine McCaughrean and Meg Rosoff.”
He lives with his family in Liverpool.
Read our feature In conversation with Frank Cottrell-Boyce, the new Waterstones Children's Laureate for 2024-26
You can find out a bit more about him and his Chitty Chitty Bang Bang triology at uk.chittyfliesagain.com
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A British Childhood is at once a searing account of our failure to look after the nation's most vulnerable citizens, and a call to arms to all of us to protect the innocence of childhood. During his time as Children's Laureate Frank Cottrell-Boyce visited schools that had been forced to make permanent homes in temporary buildings, where teachers doubled up as social workers, therapists and nutritionists.
A British Childhood features in the following genres: Books for Teachers, Parenting Books, Recommendations
Hardback. £13.49, down from the £14.99 cover price. In Stock.
A British Childhood was written by Frank Cottrell-Boyce and published by Picador an imprint of Pan Macmillan
A British Childhood has 193 pages
£13.49, reduced from £14.99. In Stock.
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