The children’s laureate, Frank Cottrell-Boyce, has urged the government to prioritise pleasure over learning in children’s reading.

Giving evidence to MPs on the education committee, which is investigating the decline in reading for pleasure among children, the screenwriter and novelist said conversations about children’s reading too often revert to attainment in school.

He said that the “business of learning to read” can put children off the pleasure of reading. “We can teach them all the steps,” he told MPs, “but the important thing is that they dance.”

The number of children reading for pleasure in the UK has declined sharply in recent years. According to the National Literacy Trust’s annual survey, just one in three aged eight to 18 enjoy reading in their spare time – a 36% decrease since 2005.

Cottrell-Boyce said the reasons included screens, austerity, Covid and poverty, including the kind of “furniture poverty” experienced in emergency social housing. “No child is going to have a bedtime story if they have not got a bed,” he said.

He urged the government to focus on early years and reading for pleasure at home and nursery, with support for parents and nursery workers who may lack confidence in reading aloud to their children as a result of their own negative experiences.

“The drive of government policy for children is always freeing up parents to do more work and putting more childcare in place. If that’s your driver for children, then this is literally the least you can do.”

Cottrell-Boyce, who is coming to the end of his two-year tenure as children’s laureate, said early-years workers were among the lowest paid and the youngest. “In nurseries there are people working who have only just stopped being children themselves.

“At this point in time, it means many of them have had an incredibly diminished experience of education as a whole because of the pandemic.”

He said taking action did not need to cost a lot of money – a lot of the infrastructure was already in place. He said building parental confidence was key, and stressed the joy of “shared reading” in community settings.

“I think the early years are everything,” he told MPs on Tuesday. “Early years is when the cake is baked. Everything after that is icing or ganache, maybe, and candles and helium balloons. It’s all fun but the cake is what matters.”

He said he was optimistic about the future of children’s reading. “I think we can fix it. It seems to me blindingly obvious that what we do is prioritise the pleasure before we get into learning.

“This is something we do with everything else. No parent says to a child, ‘When you’ve learned the offside rule then I will play football with you’. We always put the pleasure first. It seems simple to me that what you do is you make sure that happens as early in life as possible.”

Also giving evidence to MPs was Rebecca Sinclair, the president of the Publishers Association, who said a shift was needed to make reading feel “less worthy”.

She said when parents are reading with their children, it was often about “reading for skill” rather than pleasure, and she said there was not enough time and space in the school day to create joy around reading.

The UK is celebrating the national year of reading, a government-led initiative supported by the National Literacy Trust to combat declining reading-for-pleasure rates.