NLT's 2024 Annual Literacy Survey shows steep decline in reading enjoyment

Just one in three children and young people say that they enjoyed reading in their free time, and only one in five children read daily in their free time, according to the National Literacy Trust's 2024 Annual Literacy Survey. 

The organisation is now calling on the government to form a 'reading taskforce' and action plan to address the declining rates of reading enjoyment, and to prioritise reading for pleasure.  Levels of reading enjoyment have dropped steeply year-on-year since 2021, and have nearly halved since the NLT's first report was published in 2005.

The 2024 Annual Literacy Survey's findings correspond with earlier reports from Booktrust, which found that the UK ranks in the bottom third of countries worldwide for childhood reading enjoyment, and publisher Farshore, whose Consumer Insights research has also tracked an ongoing decline in children's reading for pleasure. Additional research from Farshore has shown that a daily storytime in class can be "transformational" in children's reading enjoyment and comprehension.

Steepest year-on-year fall in reading enjoyment

The NLT's figures are drawn from responses by 76,000 children and young people aged eight to 18 years, with just 35% of those respondents saying that they enjoy reading in their spare time.  The report says, "This is by far the lowest level of reading enjoyment we have recorded since we began measuring this metric in 2005."  

It is also the steepest year-on-year drop recorded, the NLT reports, with an nine percentage-point decline in reading enjoyment compared with 2023. This forms part of a broad downward trend since 2016, when almost two in three children and young people said they enjoyed reading.

How often children read is also at a historic low, with only 20% of children and young people aged 8 to 18 saying that they read daily in their free time. This marks another steep drop, a fall of 7.5 percentage-points from last year.

Other findings:

More girls than boys (40.5% vs 28.2%) say that they enjoy reading, a 12 percentage-point difference which has grown from a five percentage-point difference in 2023. This is largely because of a greater drop in reading enjoyment in boys (12.3 percentage points) than in girls (4.8 percentage points).  When it comes to reading frequency, the gender gap remained largely consistent with previous years, but just 17.5% of boys say they read daily; by far the lowest recorded in this research.

Among teenagers aged 11 to 14 years, the drop in reading for enjoyment is even steeper than for children, falling from 40% last year to 31% in 2024. There is also a fall of 11 percentage-points among those aged 14 to 16 years reading daily. Among 8- to 11-year-olds (the core reading age), the proportion of children who said they enjoyed reading in their free time dropped from 56.2% in 2023 to 51.9% in 2024.  

While there has been a narrowing of the free school meal (FSM) gap, this is not because those on free school meals enjoy reading more, but because the drop in reading enjoyment and reading frequency is greater among those who don't receive free school meals.

There are regional differences in reading enjoyment across England, with levels being highest in the West Midlands (39.5%) and Greater London (38.8%) and lowest in the South East (30.8%).

What motivates children to read:

Of those who read in their free time at least once a month, most (57%) said that they read because it helped them to relax, and 41% read because it made them feel happy. Just over half (52%) read because it helped them learn new words or new things; one third read to help them understand the views of others (32.8%) or to learn more about other people or cultures (32.4%).

Earlier research by the NLT ('Mental wellbeing, reading and writing, 2019) has demonstrated that three times as many children and young people who are most engaged with literacy have better mental wellbeing than those who are least engaged.

Moving forward to improve children's enjoyment of reading:

Unsurprisingly, the report also finds that those who enjoy reading will read more, and that children and young people who read daily have higher average standardised reading scores than children and young people who don't read daily. This was confirmed by matching the survey and reading-skill (Star Reading) data for 3,861 children and young people aged 8 to 14.

Slightly more children and young people (41%) say that they enjoy reading at school compared with at home (35%), so schools can have an impact on children's reading enjoyment. The report found that the gender divide at school was far lower than at home, and that slightly more children receiving free school meals said they enjoyed reading at school when compared with those who didn't receive them.

The Annual Literacy Survey, run annually since 2010, includes questions about reading, writing and listening as well as about children and young people’s home learning environment and access to resources at home.

Given the established links between reading enjoyment for children and young people's reading skill, learning and mental wellbeing, the report's authors called its latest findings "shocking and dispiriting".  The findings are reflected in the NLT's sister report into children and young people's writing, where writing enjoyment is also at a historic low in the UK, with fewer than three in 10 children and young people aged eight to 18 saying that they enjoy writing in their free time. 

Reasons behind the decline in reading enjoyment

The NLT report suggests that a "packed curriculum, high academic expectations, and the perception
of a challenging future" have all contributed to children having less time for reading for enjoyment and less mental space to do it, with the recent pandemic and the ongoing cost-of-living crisis exacerbating these challenges; many children and young people are struggling to access high quality reading materials.

With reading is in decline regardless of gender or age, the NLT is calling on the government to form a reading taskforce and action plan to address the declining rates of reading enjoyment, and to prioritise reading for pleasure in its curriculum and assessment review.

The NLT surveyed 76,131 children and young people aged five to 18 between 3 January and 14 March this year as part of its Annual Literacy Survey.