Request a demo
429 Too Many Requests

429 Too Many Requests

nginx
+44 (0)20 7184 4000 Contact Us Support Request a demo

Children and Young People's Reading

The authors of this Section were Christina Clark (Director of Research and Evaluation) and Irene Picton (Senior Research Manager) at the National Literacy Trust.  

With nearly two decades of tracking children and young people’s reading habits, the National Literacy Trust’s Annual Literacy Survey provides a valuable long-term perspective on reading engagement. In 2024, responses from more than 76,000 participants aged 8 to 18 revealed a sharp decline in both reading enjoyment and daily reading, with the lowest levels recorded since the survey began in 2005. These trends were seen across demographic groups and have prompted renewed discussion among educators, policymakers, and others about the factors influencing reading engagement. This chapter examines these findings in more detail and considers their potential implications. 

As Figure 6a shows, since we started asking children and young people about their reading enjoyment in 2005, levels remained relatively stable for many years, with around half reporting that they enjoyed reading in their free time. The highest level recorded was in 2016, when nearly 3 in 5 said they enjoyed reading. However, this peak was followed by a gradual decline, interrupted only briefly by a modest uplift in 2021, likely linked to increased reading during school closures amid the COVID-19 pandemic. This temporary rise was not sustained, and reading enjoyment has since declined steadily, and more recently, at a faster pace. By 2024, just one in three (34.6%) children and young people reported enjoying reading in their free time – the lowest level since the survey began in 2005 – and the sharpest year-on-year drop on record, with an 8.8 percentage-point decrease from 2023. 

Figure 6a: Percentage of children and young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading in their free time either very much or quite a lot from 2005 to 2024 

In 2023, we saw a concerning shift as reading enjoyment declined among two groups that had traditionally reported higher levels: girls and children aged 8 to 11. In 2024, while more girls than boys enjoyed reading (40.5% vs 28.5%), as in every year since 2005, we found the gender gap in reading enjoyment had tripled compared with 2023, increasing from 4.8 to 12.3 percentage points and driven largely by a greater drop in reading enjoyment for boys.

Among age groups, secondary-school-aged pupils showed the most marked declines. As in previous years, younger children reported higher enjoyment levels, with 66.5% of 5 to 8s and 51.9% of 8 to 11s saying they enjoyed reading. In contrast, only 30.7% of 11 to 14s, 29.7% of 14 to 16s, and 40.0% of 16 to 18s said the same. Reading enjoyment fell across all age groups between 2023 and 2024, but the decline was steepest among 11 to 14s (down 9.7 percentage points) and 14 to 16s (down 11.1 percentage points), compared with a smaller drop among 8 to 11s (down 4.3 points).

Enjoyment also declined for both pupils receiving free school meals (FSMs) and those who did not. However, the drop was more pronounced among non-FSM pupils, who saw a 9.2-point fall, compared with 5.6 points for those receiving FSMs. This ‘levelling down’ brought enjoyment levels between the two groups to near parity (33.9% FSM vs 34.6% non-FSM)—a gap that has only been smaller once since 2005, when it disappeared entirely in 2016.

Enjoying Reading at School

As shown in Figure 6b, more children and young people enjoyed reading at school than in their free time in 2024, but not by much. 40.5% of 8 to 18-year-olds told us they enjoyed reading at school, compared with the 34.6% who enjoyed it in their free time. Reading in free time and school were moderately positively related (r = .439), indicating that those who enjoyed reading in one setting also enjoyed reading in the other.

Figure 6b: Percentage of children and young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading in 2024 in their free time versus reading at school

In contrast to reading enjoyment in free time, a similar percentage of boys and girls told us that they enjoyed reading at school (39.5% vs 41.7%), and a slightly higher percentage of children and young people who received FSMs enjoyed reading at school compared with their peers (42.6% vs 38.7%).

As in 2023, age differences broadly reflected those seen in reading in free time, with more 8 to 11-year-olds telling us they enjoyed reading in school than their older peers. However, many more 8 to 11s said they enjoyed reading at school compared with reading in their free time (63.7% vs 51.9%), and this was also the case for 11 to 14s to an extent, with 38.0% enjoying reading in school compared with 30.7% in free time. This emphasises the vital role that schools can play in supporting reading enjoyment, particularly for children and young people who may be less likely to find reading enjoyable outside of school.

Reading Frequency

Alongside dramatic decreases in reading enjoyment levels, 2024 saw the steepest decline in daily reading levels since we started asking children and young people about their reading habits in 2005. Only 1 in 5 (20.5%) 8- to 18-year-olds told us in 2024 that they read something daily in their free time, a decrease of 7.5 percentage points from 2023, with levels nearly halving over the last 19 years (see Figure 7).

Figure 7: Percentage of children and young people aged 8 to 18 who read daily in their free time from 2005 to 2024

Overall, more girls than boys said they read something daily in their free time (23.2% vs 17.5%). However, the gender gap in daily reading has largely remained the same over the past 19 years, only marginally decreasing from a 7-percentage-point gap in 2005 to a 5.7-percentage-point difference in 2023.

Levels of daily reading decreased with age, with almost twice as many children aged 8 to 11 saying that they read something in their free time daily compared with those aged 11 to 14 (32.8% vs 18.1%) in 2024. While daily reading decreased across all age groups, there was a particularly sharp drop (10.9 percentage points) in those aged 14 to 16 between 2023 and 2024. Over a longer period of time, there has been a decrease in levels of daily reading across all age groups of around 7 percentage points. For example, 40.5% of 8 to 11-year-olds reported reading something daily in 2005 compared with 32.8% in 2024; in 11 to 14-year-olds, daily reading decreased from 25.8% to 18.1% and in 14 to 16s, from 21.4% to 14.8%.

As we saw with reading enjoyment in free time, a similar percentage of children and young people who did and did not receive FSMs read daily (19.3% vs 20.6%). While daily reading decreased across both groups in 2024 compared with 2023, the drop was larger for those who did not receive FSMs (8.2 vs 4.8 percentage points). Looking over the past 19 years, however, we can see that the FSM gap in daily reading has decreased, from an 8-percentage point gap in 2005 to almost identical levels in 2024. Unfortunately, this is explained more by the decline in daily reading in children and young people who do not receive FSMs than by an increase in daily reading in those who do.

Links Between Reading Enjoyment and Reading Frequency

This year, there was a strong positive relationship between enjoying reading in free time and reading frequency (r = .684).

While it may not be surprising to learn that those who enjoy reading report reading more frequently in their free time, the magnitude of the difference is noteworthy, we found that over eight times as many children and young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading in their free time said they read daily compared with those who did not enjoy reading (48.2% vs 5.9%).

AR and Reading Enjoyment

As mentioned, this year saw a dramatic drop in reading enjoyment and frequency. However, there were some encouraging signs linked to the use of Accelerated Reader (AR). In 2024, 28.1% (n = 17,824) of children and young people aged 8 to 16 said that they had been using AR. Now, more children and young people who reported using AR said they enjoyed reading than those who did not (29.6% vs 27.3%). This difference was more noticeable among boys (see Figure 8a), suggesting that AR may offer particular benefits for groups who traditionally report lower levels of reading enjoyment. Girls using AR also reported slightly higher enjoyment, though the difference compared with non-users was smaller.

Figure 8a: Percentage of children and young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading in 2024 by gender and use of AR

As shown in Figure 8b, the link between AR use and reading enjoyment was more pronounced among children and young people who received free school meals. In this group, more of those who used AR said they enjoyed reading compared to their peers who did not use AR (a 5.2 percentage-point difference). Among those who did not receive free school meals, the difference in reading enjoyment between AR users and non-users was much smaller (1.8 percentage points).

Figure 8b: Percentage of children and young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading by FSM and use of AR

Discussion

While England’s 10- and 15-year-olds have performed well in recent international reading assessments such as PIRLS and PISA (Lindorff et al., 2024; Ingram et al., 2023), this success may give the impression that children and young people’s reading is less of a concern than other pressing societal issues. However, these results reflect the long-term efforts of educators, policymakers, librarians, families, and others who have worked to support children and young people’s literacy, and we must now call on the same collaborative and sustained effort to address the dramatic decline in reading enjoyment.

A growing body of evidence—including our own research—consistently links reading for pleasure with a wide range of benefits, from improved academic outcomes and future employment prospects to enhanced mental wellbeing (see, e.g. Sullivan & Brown, 2015; WPI, 2021; Sun et al., 2023). To ensure that all children and young people can access these benefits, the historically low levels of reading enjoyment seen in 2024 should be viewed as a prompt for action. Given the broad educational and socioeconomic factors known to influence children and young people’s enjoyment of reading, the National Literacy Trust is galvanising support from all corners of society to make reading for pleasure a social and political priority, from making more space in the curriculum for reading for enjoyment to ensuring all primary schools have a library space to nurture the next generation of confident, motivated readers.

Continue Reading

Return to home