The National Literacy Trust has measured children and young people’s reading habits over many years and has conducted an annual UK-wide survey since 2010. Its 2024 report had a particular focus on the extent to which children are reading for enjoyment.
Published by National Literacy Trust, November 2024
RESEARCH OBJECTIVE
Children who enjoy reading and do it often are more likely to have good reading skills. But research shows reading for pleasure is also linked to attainment in other areas including vocabulary development, cognitive performance, building empathy and mental wellbeing. The National Literacy Trust has measured children and young people’s reading habits over many years and has conducted an annual UK-wide survey since 2010. Its 2024 report had a particular focus on the extent to which children are reading for enjoyment.
METHOD
In 2024, 76,131 children and young people aged five to 18 from across the UK took part in the survey and answered a range of questions including how often they read, where they do most of their reading and why they read. Researchers were able to match survey and reading skills data for 3,861 children and young people aged eight to 14 to explore relationships between reading habits and reading ability.
KEY FINDINGS
The survey found only 34.6% of children and young people aged eight to 18 said they enjoyed reading in their free time. This is by far the lowest level of reading enjoyment recorded since the trust began gathering data on reading enjoyment in 2005.
The 2024 survey also shows the steepest year-on-year drop in reading enjoyment among children and young people aged eight to 18, which was 8.8 percentage points down on the previous year. This is part of a broad downward trend since 2016 when nearly two thirds of children and young people said they enjoyed reading. Reading frequency was also at a historic low with just one in five of children and young people saying they read something daily in their free time.
The survey showed a big increase in the gap in reading enjoyment between boys and girls. This tripled from a 4.8 percentage point difference in 2023 to a 12.3 percentage point difference in 2024. The decline in reading enjoyment was particularly stark among secondary school pupils decreasing from 40.4% in 2023 to 30.7% in 2024. The gap between pupils who receive free school meals and those who don’t had reduced but this was because of a “levelling down” drop in reading enjoyment among those who don’t receive school meals.
Analysis of the matched reading skills data found children and young people who enjoyed reading had higher average reading scores than children who didn’t enjoy reading. Meanwhile, children who read daily also had higher reading scores than those who didn’t read every day.
The survey suggests reading frequency and enjoyment are intertwined. More than eight times as many young people aged 8 to 18 who enjoyed reading in their free time also said they read daily in their spare time, compared with those who didn’t enjoy reading. This suggests encouraging a child to enjoy reading will also encourage them to read more often and vice versa.
IMPLICATIONS FOR PRACTICE
The National Literacy Trust describes its findings as “shocking”. A broad range of educational and socioeconomic factors are known to influence children and young people’s enjoyment of reading. With this in mind, the trust is calling on the government to form a reading taskforce and create an action plan to address declining rates of reading enjoyment and to prioritise reading for pleasure and associated skills in its Curriculum and Assessment Review, which is due to publish recommendations this year.
FURTHER READING
What Kids Are Reading Report 2024, Keith Topping and Christina Clark, Renaissance, June 2024
Reading for pleasure: Recent research insights, Teresa Cremin, School Libraries in View, January 2023
Literacy skills seem to fuel literacy enjoyment, rather than vice versa, Elsje van Bergen and others, Developmental Science, November 2022
