Our Impact

Ealing Book Festival 2025

Overall Impact

As a charity, we seek to advance the education of the public in the London Borough of Ealing by promoting storytelling, literature and reading for pleasure.

The second Ealing Book Festival was held in April 2025. Following the Festival, we surveyed those who had purchased tickets and received nearly 100 responses. This showed attendees had a very positive experience - the average score was 4.5 out of 5, and over 70% gave a score of 5/5.

The survey showed we are having an impact on reading for pleasure. Attendees said they felt more inspired to read or write creatively after attending. The average score was 4/5 with over 80% giving a score of 4/5 or 5/5 (where a 5 means very inspired).

The Festival is intended to reach as many people as possible across Ealing and we are working to expand its reach into the diverse communities across the Borough. In 2025, nearly a quarter of attendees (23%) had never attended a book festival before. Additionally the diversity of authors appearing at the Festival was expanded.

The Ealing Book Festival is run by volunteers. A total of 51 volunteers were involved in the planning and delivery of the 2025 Festival.Ealing has a long and rich literary history. Many celebrated authors have connections to the area and to this day Ealing remains home to a large community of writers.

Children's Programme 2025

Literacy skills have a powerful impact on helping young children to reach their potential. In 2025 we piloted an event for primary school children to support their literacy education.

We invited state primary schools from across the London Borough of Ealing to attend an in-person event at the University of West London, where the local children's author Konnie Huq ran an interactive session centred around her Cookie book series. 170 children from nine primary schools attended, and the event was live-streamed to an additional four schools.

Teacher feedback was universally positive. All respondents said they would recommend the event and would attend a similar event in future - all gave scores of 4/5 or 5/5, with the majority giving 5/5.

Words used by teachers to describe the event were: “creative”, “engaging”, “exciting”, “fun”, “inspiring”, “interactive”.

Quotes from teachers include:

“I bought a group of children who wouldn’t usually get access to this type of event and they loved it and it also supported them educationally with their reading and writing. It was inspirational for them to be in a University too - thank you very much for including us. We would love to come again.”

“Schools love free events. The only thing better is a free event that promotes a love of reading!"

“Just a huge thank you. It’s so wonderful for my Southall children to see an individual that is reflective of them."

“The children really enjoyed the interactivity, and creating their own characters was very engaging."

“It was inspiring and engaging to the children.”