Children and young people's reading in 2025
literacytrust.org.uk
literacytrust.org.uk
1. Adults read less, so children see their parents reading less often (it at all!) so do not grow up thinking it is a fun thing to do. I love reading because my parents did, and my kids do because I do.
2. Schools do not make reading enjoyable. A teacher I know suggested that their school did somethings to make reading fun, and the management refused because it improve any of their metrics. A friend of by daughter's went to a school where there were times when they had to sit and read a book - nothing kills enjoyment better than being forced to do something. You are telling kids its a chore you have to do, not something done for fun.
There are other things do. There are schools that teach Shakespeare for English literature GCSE without giving them the whole text, and without watching a video of the play, let along going to the theatre.
3. There are fewer and smaller local libraries so kids cannot discover what they like as easily. There are fewer bookshops too, because people read less.
This is, I think, a tricky line to walk. Reading is, like most things, a skill that must be practiced, and school is a good place to do so. I think a bigger part of this practice that kills enjoyment is not being able to choose what you're reading; of course kids are going to dislike reading when they're forced to read books or stories they have no interest in at all.
My kids learned to read with me (flashcards, Ladybird books) for fun (flashcards were a game), and then just carried on by themselves by picking up interesting books (which relies on having access to interesting books - having books at home makes a huge difference, as does access to libraries and bookshops)
Parents can be encouraged and informed, to an extent, but the problem is that if they do not enjoy reading, you cannot pass on something you do not have yourself.
Another problem in the UK is that I think policy makers think of reading as a life skill, and education in general as preparation for work, rather than as something to enjoy - at least for the hoi polloi (or "the gammon" to use a disturbingly common term), their own kids are different.
What I did read was that early reading is not important to anything of importance, at best it can be a proxy to filter out neglected kids. Whether the kid can learn at that point is a question of brain development and you as a parent wont achieve nothing by trying to force it.
Reading per se (i.e. decoding written symbols into sounds/words, at least in English or similar languages) is a quite discrete skill that takes something like 6–12 months to learn to basic proficiency, working an average of, say, 15 minutes per day with direct guidance. It has some basic pre-requisites (attention span, interest, recognizing the alphabet), but can be done at any age; some kids might be willing to learn to read at age 3 or 4, but it can certainly be started at age 8, 12, 20, or 45.
After that, speed and fluency improves with additional practice. Like anything, it's easier to get very fluent if people start younger because they have fewer other obligations. Someone who learned to read at age 4 and then spent hours reading for fun every day for 10 years is going to be far ahead of someone who learned a bit starting at age 8 but never had much help, and afterward only occasionally skimmed some magazines for the next 5 or 6 years but mostly spent their time on something else.
As far as I know, school libraries still exist, and still have a wide selection of books. The books are rotated around schools in a county so the selection doesn't get stale.
This is what everyone in the United States asked for. You wanted data driven decision making. Do not be surprised when the measure becomes the goal.
Sorry if this sounds bitter, but I spent all day yesterday arguing with administration at a college that data driven decision making is only as good as the data you feed the system, and that specifically targeting metric improvement for its own sake is step one in the road to mind death.
The second group is much, much larger.
I don't trust vibes.
a) is this data accurate
b) is this data complete
c) is this data relevant
etc.
So even the act of selecting data is subject to bias, good judgment.
It’s not wholly subjective. Some of the processes you can use to understand your data are mathematically proven. Many others are well-tested.
In any case the idea is to try to minimise your biases and check whether your assumptions are valid so that you can make better, more reliable, more informed decisions. It doesn’t have to be a perfect system to be better.
You might not want to, of course.
Second best, however, I’d take the “vibes” of a random teacher over the religion-based decision making that seems to be on the rise in the US. “Data-driven” religiously motivated educational policy is the worst of all possible worlds.
We use it because it beats the alternative - which is either going off vibes or using even more indirect metrics to measure how successful the educational system is.
If there's one school that claims it successfully teaches children to love reading, and another school that makes no such claim, but has +50 on SAT over the first school across the board? The second one is probably a better school.
Or it's better at SAT prep? That's the entire point of OPs comment. Metrics become targets and then anything (that may still be incredibly important) but doe not contribute to that target gets lost.
"Claims it successfully teaches children to love reading" requires nothing but a willingness to make unsubstantiated claims.
Both are imperfect performance indicators, but one is considerably less imperfect than the other.
If you want your own kids to get a high SAT language score when they are high school students, the top things you can do to help them are: (1) read aloud to them when they are very young, as much as you have time for, ideally choosing excellent books of wide variety, (2) keep reading aloud to them when they are older, (3) encourage them to read for pleasure, (4) converse about the world with them, without condescending.
If you want your own kids to get a high math score, (1) surround them with technical materials (construction toys, logic puzzles, board games, circuit parts, programmable robots, or whatever) and play with them together – or if on a tight budget, improvise materials from whatever you have at hand, and (2) spend time working non-trivial word problems one-on-one. Start from https://archive.org/details/creativeproblems0000lenc
If you have the personal time to do these steps, you won't have to give a shit about what their SAT score is, because it will be good enough for whatever they need it for. (Sadly as a society we don't have the resources or motivation to get every child enough listening-to-books-read-aloud time or enough playing-with-technical-materials-with-adult-help time, so we try to replace it with cheaper and more scalable vacuous alternatives like multiplication drills, spelling quizzes, and SAT prep.)
Because if they as much as suspect you will fail, they will not let you graduate.
But statistics are kept clean :)
If your manager says your performance is based on lines of code, you will be incentivized to write lots and lots of code. Does lots and lots of code mean you are being productive and making good software? Sometimes yes! Sometimes heaps of code means you are being ultraproductive and making amazing software. It could also mean you are writing much more code than you need to, introducing new bugs, not thinking about generalizing patterns, creating technical debt, making a worse UX, all of which I'm guessing you would agree are important to software engineering. But none of those things are going to matter in the lines of code metric.
So yes, sometimes having metrics for performance are worse than imperfect. Sometimes they are antithetical to the supposed goals. Student time is a zero sum game, and having a large portion of a crucial time in their development spent cramming for one metric is not going to have good outcomes for a society, only good outcomes for a metric.
Sure, you can cram for SAT, and you can get gains on the metric from that. But you can't just cram all the answers into the students and have them get a perfect score via rote memorization. Students still have to learn things to be able to do well. Which is why SAT beats the "performance is based on lines of code" tier of shitty hilariously gameable metrics.
I've seen a few countries that went from "no standardized testing" to "full send standardized testing", and the benefits are too large to ignore. You can improve upon the tests, but removing them is a road to nowhere.
> For one, it's a huge equalizer
Could you explain this for me? It's nice that everyone is taking the same test but every piece of data I've seen points to a clear correlation between household income and SAT score, hardly an equalizer.
"Data" comes from datum [0], that is, what is given. What are the data or givens of measurement?
Whenever we measure something, we do so from the standpoint of some prior conceptualization. It makes no sense to speak of measurement apart from some conceptual context, as the measurement is of something as it is understood. It is through this conceptual background that we can situate some thing as a measurement, as data, and understand the meaning of this measurement, infer implications, and so on. Some call this the theory-ladenness of observation.
So you cannot say "Data! QED.", first, the meaning of the given is inaccessible without knowledge of its nature and the prior knowledge that allows us to locate the data in the appropriate context, and second, because data are not arguments. Data are used in arguments.
So if your conceptual context is flawed, your measurements are vulnerable, both in their motivating rationale and in their interpretation. A little error in the beginning leads to a great one in the end. And there's a lot of crap people carry around in their conceptual baggage.
So, we have at least three attack surfaces: the conceptual presuppositions of a theory, the theory, and the data sought to corroborate the theory.
Of course, theory-ladenness does not necessarily entail relativism [1]. So, the point isn't that we can't know anything, so anything goes, or that we don't know anything, so burn it all down. The argument is that we should be more cognizant of the bases of our justifications.
[0] https://www.etymonline.com/word/data
[1] https://edwardfeser.blogspot.com/2025/08/hanson-on-observati...
Blind data-driven decisions destroy all illegible good in this world that can't be boiled down to some number going up. And there's a lot of it.
By contrast poll people on their 'vibes' of the economy and you'd suddenly get some real and meaningful data that can't really be gamed beyond outright lying about the results. You'd of course have things like people wearing rose colored glasses with regards to the economy when 'their side' is in power, but that doesn't really change the validity of their opinion. And those opinions, as an aggregate, can really provide a lot of really valuable information.
Reading tweets and text messages is still reading. My nephew has trouble learning to read, until he started playing minecraft and needed to read websites and instructions for mods and such. Then getting his first cellphone did away with any concept of reading difficulties. We have entire economies of people reading text on computers all day (ie my job). I would bet that the average person today read better/faster than their equivalent in centuries past. They are reading junk, but they are actually reading.
Until recently, the internet was mostly text, we didn't have the bandwidth for anything else. And it meant reading. Text messengers took the place of phone calls, even more reading. Text was also how video games told stories, more reading. And finally, subtitles, they keep growing in popularity, so even when you are watching videos, you are reading.
GenX was all about TV, boomers spent more time outside and talking, and if you get far enough back, people didn't even know how to read. I think GenZ still read a lot, but now, audiovisual content is more prevalent on the internet than it was before. Also, audiobooks gained in popularity.
Maybe we should make define what "reading" is. Is it actual reading, as in textual communication, or is it consuming books, but in this case, do audiobooks count?
If you only count reading paper books, then sure, people read less, but that's because there are so many alternatives nowadays. And maybe some attention deficit.
"enjoy reading either very much or quite a lot"
2023 to 2024, 5 to 8: 75.3 to 64.7
2023 to 2024, 8 to 18: 43.4 to 34.6
~250,000 layoffs @ ~1300 companies in 2023 [1]. Add another 100,000 and 1,000 if you take late 2022. And layoffs.fyi just tracks tech layoffs.
The WARN database has similar results. Been averaging 300-400 a month since January 2023, vs ~100 / month in the 2021-2022 timeframe. [3]
That's a lot of dislocation, moving to find jobs, household chaos, school shifting, and parents with different priorities.
[1] "Layoff Charts Tab" https://layoffs.fyi
[2] https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1dvdssj/oc...
When I was younger and read fiction I had access to a fair amount of copies of young adult novels that would never be front-and-center at a bookstore or library. In fact I think that most of these books were the rejects from the main libraries in my town. Violence, abandonment, resent, regret abound! Many of it was senseless and the endings were not as neat and resolved as the schoolteacher led me to believe how all books ought to end.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion.
I grew up obsessively rereading Redwall, Pendragon, RA Salvatore’s stuff, Ranger’s Apprentice, Enders Game, Tyrant of Jupiter, Maze Runner. Like you said, the me of now can’t recommend things like Tyrant, but still I can’t imagine that would have appealed to any of the girls I knew at that time, let alone the young women of today.
By the same token, although I read Twilight and Hunger Games, I never was obsessed like the girls in my classes were. I can’t imagine that boys today are particularly interested in A Court Of Thorns and Roses and the other spiritual successors of Hunger Games, Divergent, Twilight, etc.
That is just you being sexist tho.
If you have seen only boys liking Harry Potter, LOTR or Ender Game, then it is purely result of who you picked as friends. Because girls read all of those.
Characterizing girls as only liking Harry Potter and Orlando Bloom is like saying boys only liked WWF and Jackass. It's a mindless stereotype.
Like I said, I can't recommend that series now that I have a more mature perspective. But I can't imagine that a book written by a misogynistic author with explicit themes of female submission to male authority obtained by use or threats of physical and sexual violence would be particularly appealing to women in general, let alone women who have grown up in a culture that has in recent times had much more acknowledgement of such things, e.g. MeToo, more widespread conversations about toxic masculinity, the oppression of women by physical force and the male-dominated hierarchy that projects that force.
If you disagree and think that young women (and enby people) would find such books appealing though, I'm interested to hear why.
Are you familiar with romance novels? Which gender do you think is reading stuff like https://www.amazon.com/Morning-Glory-Milking-Cambric-Creek-e...
Edit: the subtext I’m speaking of is of submission and domination through implicit or explicit coercion. I’m not speaking of sub/dom with connotations of mutual enjoyment and consent, as can be the case in real or fictional situations of romance in general or even specific kinks like BDSM. I may be called sexist for this but my perception is that women can and do enjoy the latter (as the popularity of books like you linked imply) and greatly dislike the former
I don't think there is a solution except some form of affirmative action.
Tolstoy: the Crimea
Hemingway: Italy, Spain, Cuba, Germany, France
Orwell: Spain
Mailer: the Philippines, Japan
Fanon: France, Algeria
Also, young men have literally no shortage of violent or resentful entertainment in their disposal.
To your credit, I’m sharing my impression of the books that I read in elementary school. Come to find out they may not have been as obscure for as I thought. I was just 8/9 years old reading YA novels. Joe Hardy’s girlfriend dying in that car bomb must have awakened something primal in me.
I’m not recommending this experience. But young men do need author[itie]s to guide them through the discomforting aspects of their lives in an un-fantastic fashion. Start em while they’re young!
And we’re talking about young men, visceral depictions of real life drama and books. Reading is a different experience than digital media, would you agree?
> Slightly more children and young people who didn’t receive free school meals (FSMs) told us they enjoyed reading compared with their peers who received FSMs
But I suspect that would not be that easy. I think both books and text adventures would be competing against activities with much lower requirements on effort, and much higher immediate rewards.
The risk of this approach might be that it could suck the fun out of it making it a chore, but that has not been the case - they both like to read books now.
Creating that space for reading has been essential. It's impossible to compete against all of the other things otherwise.
I really love kids books of all sorts - especially the illustrated ones are real works of art.
Books are not culturally relevant anymore, not for adults and not for children.
Some parents I know have suggested it's much, much easier to find newer books which interest daughters than books which might interest their son. They asked me to find some newer books he might find interesting.
Does anyone have suggestions on 2020s books aimed at adolescent boys? Ideally ones more focused on the real experience of boyhood, I think he'd be less interested in ones focused making adult commentary on social or identity topics.
for a boy the Hardy boys is the equivalent..
Also depends on the age but other good ones are:
Artemis Fowl Alex Rider Berenstain Bears
While they're not high quality, with a couple of exceptions, they're very fun to read, and in my opinion, while you can spend your time reading only high quality books, it's nice to just have what is essentially the fast food of fiction as well. Reading is a habit, and creating it by focusing on something like this, can still allow you to read something with depth and quality later on.
There's a big market for this for girls and for women in any book store, but for the most part, you can't find the same for men.
If you want specific recommendations you can check around /r/rational on reddit, since they tend to cover some of the better stories from that site.
My son is not nearly as voracious as she is, but has, in the past 6 months started to really value his reading time, enough that he gets upset when things interfere with it. Also, he now goes out and researches books to read (often via YouTube during his Youtube time). I think what got him here was consistency.
We've read to them every night until they were in second grade and then required them to read overnight. It took a while to take hold with both, but once it did they dove in and now really value it.
As for what he is reading - Diary of a wimpy kid series, Percy Jackson, Mysterious Benedict Society are the current favorites.
Having a female protagonist doesn't necessarily mean boys can't enjoy a book, of course. I (a boy) enjoyed Nancy Drew just as much as The Hardy Boys when I was young. But I suspect modern writings with girl protagonists are more focused on targeting girls than on making good stories that happen to feature girls, and may not be as universally enjoyable.
Some recent-ish off-the-beaten track suggestions that our daughter really liked that might be appealing to boys:
1. The Unknown Adventurer books (https://www.theunknownadventurer.com): beautifully illustrated, Journey to the Last River is wonderful. We have the Lost Book of Adventure too, but our daughter didn't enjoy that one as much, I think that one would appeal more to boys. Looking at the page I see they have a third, I'll have to pick that up.
2. Almost anything by David Almond, although his young adult stuff tends to blend into his adult work and not all of it is appropriate/interesting depending on reading/maturity level. Plenty of male protagonists, mostly universal themes, some quite strange. I'd recommend reading them first to get an idea if they'd be good for your kid, I loved them. His first book Skellig is probably a good place to start just to see if you like the style or not, although they're all quite different from each other.
3. We really liked A Wish in the Dark, by Christina Soontornvat. Some social commentary but also a great story in an interesting world: https://soontornvat.com/books/a-wish-in-the-dark/. I also highly highly recommend All Thirteen, the non-fiction story of the Thai cave rescue, absolutely amazing story: https://soontornvat.com/books/all-thirteen/.
4. The Orphans of the Tide series by Struan Murray are great adventure/fantasy stories, if occasionally a little dark for younger kids. We got distracted before getting to the last one in the series, but the first two were good.
I can't help so much with stories specifically for boys, but generally I find that just focusing on high-quality, well written books of any stripe are a good bet. If you have a good bookshop nearby, go and find the helpful person - they can help steer you. And buy books from them so they stick around :-)
This might be an odd take, but I never liked reading books and have read very few books in my whole life. I do love to read news articles, forum posts, magazines etc. because the format fits me.
Judging myself by my education level and career I'd say I did just fine without opening a single book.
So was it half of the kids before or two thirds?
51.1% - 36% = 32.7%
68.7% - 36%. = 32.7%
Since they do use "percentage points" further down, presumably it was 51% in 2005
I think it means actual books.
I think it excludes forums, discord chats, and general online stuff.
Kids are forced to read more than ever before to interact with their peers. The rise of sites like Web Novel and Royal Road are inspirational. I would guess that there are more "writers" than ever before in history.
That section does show that 2/3rds of screen reading though is direct messages, social media, and text in video games. Blogs and forums only hit 1/4.
Kids might be forced to read more than ever before, but not all reading is the same, anymore than using a games console and iPad as a kid makes you fully computer literate.
There is a linked PDF, but I'd actually be more interested in reading the original survey to see how 'reading' is being framed. Is an hour in the HN comments section counted as reading for fun?