Here in Thanet, we have the lowest children’s literacy rate and the highest child poverty rate in all of Kent. An increasing number of local schoolchildren rely on free school meals and many pupils don’t have English as a first language. With library closures, funding cuts and the effects of the global pandemic still felt, schools are facing huge cost pressures and simply don’t have the budget for new books.

In autumn 2021 The Margate Bookshop launched the Free Books for Schools campaign, collecting donations through our customer base in order to buy books for local primaries. So far, we have raised over £5000, equating to about 1000 books. Using our trade discount, we’re able to “top up” the donations that come in: this means that

for every £100 donated, we’re providing children with up to £150 worth of books!

Working directly with the schools and with publishers, The Margate Bookshop has put together a list of children’s books for teachers to browse and choose their titles from. Our list is made up of the shop’s bestselling children’s books, recommended curriculum reading, publishers’ highlights and brand new titles, to include both fiction and non-fiction, classics, and a focus on inclusivity and social issues.

Our fundraiser is ongoing. Beautiful and inspiring new books are being published constantly and we feel all children should be able to delight in discovering them and get excited about the-next-book-in-the-series. You can donate below or through our Gofundme page. The money donated is shared evenly across ten Margate primary schools based on number of pupils. Each school is free to choose whether to keep their books for their library or to donate them to individual children from low-income families. The larger primaries we are working with are Drapers Mills Primary Academy, Northdown Primary School and Cliftonville Primary School (the largest in Margate, with 820 pupils). A full list of the schools we are working with can be found here.