If you were encouraged to read as a child and developed a lifelong love of reading, you’re lucky. Reading turned me into a writer and writing always sends me back to reading. But I know I’m lucky.
According to The National Literacy Trust’s 2025 Annual Literacy Survey the number of children and young people who enjoyed reading is at its lowest in twenty years. The survey collected 114,970 responses from children and young people across the UK, aged between five and eighteen. The Trust is clear about the stark reality:
Without literacy, it’s hard to live the life you want. From your earliest years, literacy skills help you develop and communicate. But when you have a tough start in life, it’s easy to fall behind.
At school, having the literacy skills to read, write, speak and listen are vital for success. If you find these things hard, then you struggle to learn. It affects your confidence and self-esteem.
As an adult, without these same literacy skills, you can’t get the jobs you want, and navigating every day life can be difficult – from using the internet, to filling out forms or making sense of instructions on medicines or road signs. If you have children, it’s hard to support their learning, and so the cycle continues.
Reading for pleasure helps us develop empathy, confidence and a love of learning. It expands worlds, sharpens minds and fuels creativity. When I was a child, escaping into other worlds through books was a magical experience. It still is, but when I was young I didn’t know I was developing empathy with the characters – and so with the humans in my real world – I just knew I cried and laughed with them, was frightened and delighted for them and ended up wanting to make people live inside books myself.
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For those who don’t (yet) enjoy reading, there is hope. The Literacy Trust’s survey captures the things children and young people said would get them reading: comics; graphic novels; sports reports; song lyrics; books with gorgeous covers; books in digital or audio formats; news items; stories a friend or family member or teacher loves; books tied to films or tv series. And I suggest listening to stories too, in primary schools and with caregivers and family: a wise storyteller called Beulah Candappa once said:
The written word goes from the eye to the brain but the spoken word goes from the ear to the heart.
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There are many many ways to encourage a person to read. And once they’re intrigued, they’ll want to find out what happens next … .
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This year is the UK’s National Year of Reading. You can volunteer with them, or with the National Literacy Trust to help young people find their way into reading. As Jonathan Douglas, Chief Executive of the National Literacy Trust, said of the 2025 report:
We must meet young readers where they are – emotionally, culturally and digitally – if we are to reignite a love of reading across the UK.
Let’s get them all reading.
