Reading for fun is back up: help it stick at home

For years, the National Literacy Trust’s annual reading survey has been the education story nobody wanted to write. Each June, fewer children said they enjoyed reading, until in 2025 the figure reached its lowest point in twenty years. This June, for the first time in a while, it moved the other way.

The rise is small, and the Trust is careful not to oversell it. It is still worth understanding, because the same report says a good deal about what tends to go with a child who reads for fun, and most of that happens at home.

The numbers, plainly

The Trust asked 125,375 children and young people aged 5 to 18, from 479 schools across the UK, about their reading between January and March 2026 (National Literacy Trust, 2026).

Among 8 to 18-year-olds, 36.1% said they enjoy reading in their free time either very much or quite a lot, up from 32.7% in 2025. It is the first rise since 2021. For scale: the figure was 51.4% when the Trust began asking in 2005, and it peaked at 58.6% in 2016.

Daily reading moved as well. 20.3% of 8 to 18-year-olds said they read something every day in their free time, up from 18.7% the year before.

Teenagers gained the most. Enjoyment rose by around six percentage points among 14 to 16-year-olds, and by around eight among 16 to 18-year-olds.

What did not move

The rise was not shared evenly, and the Trust is plain about that.

Among the youngest children, aged 5 to 8, enjoyment slipped slightly, from 62.6% to 61.6%. Boys account for the dip: their enjoyment fell while girls’ rose, so the gap between them widened again.

The gap between better-off and poorer children widened too. Among children who do not get free school meals, enjoyment rose from 33.0% to 37.3%; among those who do, only from 31.0% to 32.1%.

The report does not pin the rise on any one cause, and neither will we. 2026 is the National Year of Reading, and the Trust calls this year’s figures an early signal, saying it is too soon to know whether the change will last. Enjoyment is still far below where it stood a decade ago.

What goes with a child who enjoys reading

The headline is not the most useful part of the report. The Trust also looked at what differs between children who enjoy reading and those who do not, and two things stand out. They are links rather than proof of cause, but strong ones.

Reading that connects with their interests. Of the children who enjoy reading and read at least weekly, 72.1% said they find things to read that interest them. Among children who neither enjoy reading nor do much of it, the figure was 20.9%. And in the 2025 survey, when children were asked what makes them want to read, the top answers were reading connected to a film or series they love (38.1%) and to their interests or hobbies (37.1%) (National Literacy Trust, 2025).

Encouragement at home. 70.1% of the keen, regular readers said they are encouraged to read at home, against 30.4% of those who rarely or never read. More strikingly, encouragement at home was common even among children who read every week without much enjoying it (63.3%). The Trust reads this as a sign that support from the people around a child may keep reading going while the enjoyment has not yet arrived.

Its own summary puts it simply: reading is more likely to become part of children’s lives “when it feels meaningful and is supported by the people around them”.

What the Trust says helps

Alongside the survey, the Trust gives parents plain advice, and it lines up with the numbers.

Let them choose. Its advice to families is to “allow them the space to choose what they read”, and in 2025 a quarter of children (26.6%) said the freedom to choose is what motivates them (National Literacy Trust). Comics, magazines, cereal packets, audiobooks and podcasts all count on the Trust’s own list.

Make a little time, often. The Trust suggests ten minutes a day. Its parents’ site, Words for Life, puts it neatly: “A good 10 minutes is better than a difficult half hour” (Words for Life).

Keep reading to them. The same tips suggest a bedtime story every night. Listening counts as a way in, too: in the Trust’s 2024 survey of children’s listening, 37.5% said audio had sparked their interest in reading books (National Literacy Trust, 2024).

Let them see you read. The first of the Trust’s fifteen tips is two words long: “Read yourself!” Children copy what the grown-ups around them actually do, not what they say.

What to try this week

No plan is needed. Pick two or three of these.

Ask your child what they are into right now, then find one thing to read about it: a magazine, the book of the series, a guide to the game. Don’t check whether it counts as “proper” reading. It does.

Take them to the library and let them choose, with no veto from you. Expect a joke book. That is fine.

Find ten minutes at the same time each day and protect it, lightly. After tea, before lights out, in the car if someone else is driving.

Read something of your own where they can see you, out loud if it is funny.

And say something encouraging about their reading that has nothing to do with how well they do it. “You looked like you were miles away in that book” lands better than any gold star.

Where letters fit

Reading that is about them, with someone at home who cares what happens next, is more or less what a Journee letter is. A child gets the next chapter of a story in the post with their name on the envelope, stars in it alongside the people they love, and at the end decides what happens next, which gives the whole family something to talk about until the next one comes. Our page on helping your child love reading says more about how it fits in, and if your child is further from books than this, our guide to helping a reluctant reader starts from the beginning.