Most parents can remember the last time they had to tell their child to put a book down. It might have been at the dinner table, or at eleven o’clock on a school night when a torch was still glowing under the duvet. What few parents notice is the point at which those reminders stopped being necessary. There is rarely a single moment. A series is left unfinished, a library card quietly expires, and by the middle of secondary school the only books in the bedroom are the ones with a syllabus attached.
That retreat from reading is one of the most common patterns in British education and one of the least discussed at parents’ evenings. It matters far more than its quietness suggests. For Yasmin Sarwar, who has spent more than two decades in university preparation and sixth form education in the United Kingdom, the books a teenager chooses for themselves can say more about their academic future than the ones they are told to read.
Where the readers go
The National Literacy Trust has been asking children about their reading habits since 2005, and its findings this year offered some rare good news. In its 2026 survey of more than 125,000 children and young people, 36.1 per cent of 8 to 18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading in their free time. That was up from 32.7 per cent the year before, the first rise since 2021, and the improvement was largest among older teenagers.
The longer view is less comfortable. Around six in ten children aged five to eight say they enjoy reading, while across the 8 to 18 range the figure is closer to one in three, and the report is clear that this year’s rise sits within a much longer decline. Somewhere between the end of primary school and the start of GCSEs, a great many children who once read for fun simply stop.
The reasons are not mysterious. Homework expands, phones arrive and friendships move online. Reading also changes character at secondary school, where a book increasingly comes with questions at the end. A novel that was once an escape becomes a text to be annotated, and a habit that used to be private starts to feel like more work.
The surprise in the maths scores
The academic argument for protecting that habit is stronger than many parents realise. Dr Alice Sullivan and Matt Brown, researchers at the Institute of Education in London, used the 1970 British Cohort Study to follow around 6,000 young people between the ages of 10 and 16. They compared children from similar backgrounds who had achieved similar test scores earlier in childhood. Those who read for pleasure made more progress in vocabulary, spelling and maths over those six years than those who rarely read.
It is the maths result that tends to surprise people. Sullivan’s explanation was that strong readers are better able to absorb and understand new information, which helps in every subject. The study also found that reading for pleasure was more strongly linked to progress than having a parent with a degree, a striking result for anyone who assumes academic advantage is mostly inherited.
Sarwar recognises the same pattern from years of working with sixth formers. The students who adjust most easily to A-Level study are not always those with the strongest GCSE grades. More typically they are the ones who can read a dense passage once and hold its argument in their heads, who can work out an unfamiliar word in a chemistry question from its context, and whose essays sound like a person thinking. Few of those abilities are taught directly. They build up slowly, mostly unnoticed, over thousands of pages read for no particular reason.
The trouble with improving books
When parents notice that a child has stopped reading, the instinct is to intervene with something worthwhile. A list of classics appears on the fridge. A reading log is introduced. Graphic novels and football autobiographies are gently discouraged in favour of something that might look better on a personal statement.
Sarwar’s view is that this usually makes things worse. She has long argued that young people tend to learn most effectively when they do not realise they are learning, and that adults are too quick to dismiss children’s interests as hobbies. A fourteen-year-old who reads every match report on their club’s website, or works through a fantasy series that runs to a dozen volumes, is building the stamina to follow a long piece of writing and collecting vocabulary along the way. Telling them it does not count is a reliable way to make them stop.
It is worth noticing what the Sullivan and Brown study measured. Alongside books, it counted teenagers who read newspapers more than once a week at 16. The researchers were not asking whether young people were reading the right things, only whether they were reading often and by choice. The National Literacy Trust’s work points in a similar direction: children aged eight to 11 engage with the widest range of material, and it is after that point that reading begins to fall away.
None of this means set texts should be abandoned or that every comic is equal to a novel. Challenge matters, and a good English teacher will push a student towards writing they would never have found alone. The point is about sequence. A teenager who already reads for pleasure will take on a difficult book far more willingly than one who has come to associate reading with being marked.
Time, choice and a phone in another room
The practical steps are modest, which is part of their appeal. In her view, the emphasis belongs on time and choice rather than targets. A teenager who has twenty minutes before bed with the phone charging in another room is more likely to pick up a book than one who is told to read for half an hour and write it down. A child taken to a library or bookshop and allowed to choose, without commentary, is more likely to finish what they bring home.
Adults matter too, though not always in the way they expect. Teenagers are sharp observers of what grown-ups actually value, and a house where parents read in front of their children says more than any lecture about screens. Talking about a book, rather than quizzing a child on it, keeps reading in the category of things people do because they want to.
Patience helps as well. A reading habit that lapses at 13 can still be recovered at 15 or 16, sometimes through a single book that arrives at the right moment. The latest National Literacy Trust figures, with their strongest gains among older teenagers, suggest the door does not close as firmly as many parents fear.
The advantage nobody measures
Predicted grades, mock results and university offers are visible, and families are right to watch them closely. Reading for pleasure sits underneath all of them, seldom credited and almost never measured. Yasmin Sarwar’s argument is that it deserves more attention than it gets, partly because nobody is grading it.
A student who reads widely at 15 does not arrive at sixth form with a certificate to prove it. What they bring is harder to see: a larger vocabulary, more patience with difficult material, and the sense that a page of dense text is something to work through rather than something to dread. The torch under the duvet was never really a discipline problem. It may well have been the most useful hour of that child’s education, and nobody had set it.
