This week, Meriden celebrated Book Week, and it gave me cause to reflect on the importance of reading, not just for our girls’ academic success, but for their character development.

The timing felt significant. Just a few weeks ago, the 2026 NAPLAN results were released nationally, and the headlines were not encouraging. Reading scores fell across nearly every year group tested, and one in three Australian students did not meet the basic literacy and numeracy benchmarks expected of them. Education ministers are now debating whether a return to pen and paper testing is needed, and whether time spent scrolling through short messages, rather than reading longer, richer text, is part of the problem.

I want to reassure our community that Meriden’s own results this year sit well above the NSW state average across every domain and year level, including reading, where our girls’ “Exceeding” rates outstrip the state average by 30 to 40 points depending on the cohort. That is something to be proud of, and a credit to our staff and our girls alike. But it is not a reason for complacency. These results don’t happen by accident, and sustaining them takes deliberate effort from all of us, at school and at home. Reading is not a given. It is not something that simply happens to us. It is similar to a muscle, and like any muscle, it needs to be used, or it weakens.

Reading has always mattered to me personally. As a child, I loved the way a book could immerse me somewhere entirely different, a new place, a new time, a new set of experiences, all built out of nothing more than words on a page. That sense of being transported has stayed with me my whole life, through childhood, through my teenage years, and into adulthood, even now when I don’t have nearly as much time to read as I once did. The characters and worlds I encountered as a girl shaped how I saw things, and some of that influence has stayed with me for decades, in ways I still notice today. Those encounters ranged from magic lands at the top of a tree, to goat herding in the Swiss Alps, to the sweeping American South, where a feisty and headstrong heroine made such an impression on me that, many years later, I named my own daughter after her.

That is the thing about books. They don’t just entertain us while we’re reading them. They stay with us. They shape the way we see the world and the people we admire, often long after we’ve closed the final page.

So this Book Week, I want to offer our families a few thoughts on how you might support your daughter’s reading at home:

• Let her choose. Girls are far more likely to stick with reading when the book is one they’ve picked themselves, even if it isn’t what you would have chosen for her. Graphic novels, series fiction and non-fiction all count.
• Read together, even as she gets older. Reading aloud, or simply reading in the same room at the same time, sends a powerful message that reading matters, at any age.
• Model it yourself. Daughters notice what their parents do far more than what they say. Letting her see you reading, for pleasure rather than for work, is one of the simplest things you can do.
• Make space for it. A short, protected block of time before bed or on a weekend morning, free from screens, can be enough to build the habit.
• Talk about what she’s reading. A few genuine questions about a book’s characters or story show interest without turning it into a comprehension exercise.
• Visit the library or a bookshop together. Browsing and choosing is part of the pleasure, and it keeps reading feeling like a treat rather than a task.

As I spoke to the girls about book week, I challenged them to exercise their reading muscle this week by picking up a book that genuinely interested them. I look forward to hearing their reviews on the books they selected.

Happy Book Week!!