This was originally published in Tes magazine on June 10, 2017

Lauren Child is sitting at a round wooden table in her almost-finished studio near Primrose Hill in London. It is the first purpose-built studio she has had during her career as a bestselling author.

It is also a space that Child, 51, may be spending less time in than originally planned, as she has just been made the tenth children’s laureate - a role that lasts for two years.

Since taking up the honour in June, she has already been making headlines: questioning why books with female protagonists are less popular than those about boys, speaking out about the need for diversity in children’s books and emphasising the importance of letting children daydream.

Reflecting on her own school days, Child remembers spending time being able to explore and wonder. Raised in Wiltshire, she comes from an educationally-savvy family. Her mother, Janet, was a primary school teacher and her father, Robin, was head of art at Marlborough College.

She attended four schools between the age of 5 and 11, which ranged from a term in a town school (“I was overwhelmed by the noise”) and a village school, at which she remembers being taken out on trips to find flints or watch lambs being born.

Child went to her local comprehensive, St John’s, but moved to the sixth form at Marlborough College to study A levels in English, art and history of art.

She remembers how the pressure to do well at school started ratcheting up from a young age - even though she was a pupil at a time before Sats and after the 11-plus examination.

“The homework began when I was 11 and got increasingly challenging,” she said. “Now it seems very tough on children. You’ve got to reach this level of arithmetic or spelling or writing or reading. There so many things we are expecting them to achieve.”

She is not a fan of the Sats tests that children take at the ages of 7 and 11. Would she like to see them abolished?

“Yes I would. I don’t really see the point,” she says. “I really hate testing for little people.”

Child is concerned that the focus on certain subjects can sideline other important lessons - music, drawing, or even just learning how to get on with people in a group.

She points out that for her and her daughter, Tuesday, who she adopted from Mongolia five years’ ago, drawing was crucial as a common language - a way for them to communicate.

“Without drawing, it would have been very difficult,” Child says. “That gave her enormous confidence - that she could draw and we appreciated her drawing.”

Child is quick to point out that she is not advocating a greater focus by schools on the arts per se - it is more than she wants pupils to be taught a broad range of subjects.

She explains: “My final junior school got the balance perfectly. You did all your maths, science lessons, sport, walking, art and projects.

“It’s absolutely necessary to have a timetable of things you learn. But it’s just that all that sort of ‘time to draw’, ‘time to invent something’,’ time to make something’ seems to have gone into the not-very-important box.”

It is “ludicrous”, she says, that children who are musical or who love art get the message that their skills are not valuable. “I would feel the same if they were saying that about science, if they were saying science wasn’t important. There has to be a balance,” she adds.

The art of maths

Art was the subject in which Child particularly excelled at school, taking her O-level early and going onto study at art college after A levels - later taking a job painting Damien Hirst’s spot paintings. But her favourite teacher was her Latin teacher, Mr Clague, who stoked a life-long interest in Roman history. (“I wrote to him when I went to Pompeii. I was 38 but I had to tell him,” she laughs.)

She also remembers being a very good long-distance runner - something she puts down to her competitiveness and determination.

What she wasn’t so good at was maths. Despite “hours and hours” of extra tuition she failed her O level, repeatedly.

“But I never hated maths,” she said. “I had a great teacher who stepped in and taught me the magic of maths, but by then it was too late. Now, I love maths, I love codes. When you look at times tables and look at the numbers and see the pattern - it’s like a key, and meeting Marcus was amazing.”

Marcus is Marcus du Sautoy, the Simonyi professor for the public understanding of science and a professor of maths at the University of Oxford. He is a consultant on Child’s Ruby Redfort books, in which a teen secret agent - who happens to be a genius code cracker - works undercover to solve crimes.

These books, aimed at readers aged 10 and older, were a departure for Child, who is best-known for her picture books. Her first book, Clarice Bean That’s Me, published in 1999, was written while she was working as a receptionist at the design agency Big Fish. (“They allowed me to do my books at my desk. I loved all the comings and goings. I found it quite inspiring,” she says.)

The book won a Nestle Smarties Book Prize award and introduced readers to her amusing characters and quirky style of collage, which uses photographs alongside illustrations.

But it was arguably the much-loved Charlie and Lola books that made the biggest impact. The books were made into a Bafta-winning TV series, which Child worked on as an associate producer.

On being approached for the Waterstones children’s laureate role, Child admits to feeling “slightly stunned” and thinking: “I don’t know if I could do that.”

“Then one of my publishers said: ‘I’m sure you can do it’,” Child continues. “And I thought, ‘Yeah, of course. It is a real opportunity. It would be really crazy not to say yes’.”

Her plans for the laureateship include working with other artists, writers, filmmakers and musicians, “to talk about creativity and how one thing inspires another and all that drift time that I think children need”.

She adds: “I think everybody needs to do things for the pleasure of doing them, rather than with an end goal.”

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