Meg Rosoff condemns UK education policy as an 'assault on childhood'

Accepting the Astrid Lindgren award, the YA novelist attacked overwhelming stress on exams over culture

Meg Rosoff has condemned the government’s “assault on childhood”, saying that teaching and learning have become “joyless” in the UK.

Rosoff is the author of seven YA novels including the international bestseller How I Live Now. She was speaking as she received the SEK5m (£410,000) Astrid Lindgren Memorial award, the world’s richest prize for children’s literature, in Stockholm on Monday night. She told her audience that she had met “too many children” in the UK “who cut themselves with razors, starve themselves, who suffer depression and anxiety, who believe what the government tells them – that nothing is more important than exams. That art and music and books will not help them make money. That it is OK to close libraries and do away with librarians.”

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