Only a quarter of UK children aged five to seventeen read for pleasure daily or nearly daily in 2025, according to NielsenIQ BookData figures highlighted in HarperCollins Children’s Books and Farshore’s 2026 review. The equivalent figure in 2012 was 39%.
That is a worrying change. It is also a reason to look carefully at what the numbers mean, rather than declare an entire generation allergic to paper.
What the 25% Figure Measures
The 2026 report uses a frequency category of four or more days per week. Its headline comparison is between 2012 and 2025, not a sudden collapse during the past week. The share who rarely or never read rose from 5% to 15%.
There is a brighter detail: daily and weekly reading increased among eleven-to-seventeen-year-olds between 2024 and 2025.
Frequency, enjoyment and ability are different measures. A child who reads three days a week does not count in that top frequency category, but has not stopped reading. Nor does the survey tell us that three quarters of children cannot read.
The Reading Paradox Is Not a Verdict Against Phonics
The report argues that pressure around reading progress can crowd out enjoyment. It values both literacy skills and voluntary reading, drawing on consumer data, earlier studies and new work with The Reading Agency.
That is a concern worth discussing. It does not establish that phonics caused the decline. A trend measured over several years cannot, on its own, isolate one teaching method from every other change in children’s lives.
Phonics helps children connect written letters with sounds. Reading for pleasure concerns whether they want to use their reading skills voluntarily. These are not competing subjects from which families must choose one winner.
England’s Department for Education reading framework, expanded in 2023, explicitly covers both systematic phonics and a reading-for-pleasure culture. That does not prove every classroom achieves the balance. It does show that “the curriculum has no place for enjoyment” is too sweeping—and that guidance applying to England should not be treated as one identical system across the whole UK.
Blaming a Generation Does Not Help a Tired Parent
It is tempting to turn a complicated problem into a neat chain: one generation was taught badly, then grew up and passed its dislike of books to the next. Neat is not the same as demonstrated.
To establish that explanation, we would need evidence linking people’s actual schooling to their later behavior, while accounting for other influences. A label such as “Gen Z” does not provide that evidence.
Parents also arrive at bedtime with different amounts of time, energy and confidence. A useful response needs room for the adult who loves reading but has had a dreadful day, as well as the adult who finds reading difficult. Neither is helped by being cast as the villain in the national literacy story.
The practical question is smaller and kinder: what would make sharing a book possible and pleasant in this household?
Make Room for a Story That Is Not a Test
BookTrust’s reading-together advice includes letting children choose the book and helping them experience reading positively beyond homework. That gives families a useful starting point.
For example, you could:
- Offer a choice between a funny story, a comic and a book about something the child already loves.
- Share a manageable stretch of reading instead of setting an ambitious target that turns the evening into a negotiation.
- Enjoy the pictures, voices and jokes together without making every page a comprehension exercise.
- Ask a librarian for options when the books at home are not catching anyone’s interest.
This can sit alongside the practice a child needs for school. A pleasure-reading moment need not replace teaching, and teaching need not occupy every encounter with a book.
If the chosen story involves an outrageous number of farting animals, consider the possibility that literary taste is still under construction. Even a very dignified cat starts by attacking its own tail.
Skills and Enjoyment Both Deserve Space
A publisher has a commercial interest in more reading, so its interpretation deserves scrutiny like anyone else’s. That is not grounds to dismiss the figures—or to invent cynical motives for every person working in publishing.
The most useful response is to take the decline seriously without making the explanation more certain than the evidence allows. Help children become capable readers, and give them reasons to want to read. The pleasure part should not feel like an optional extra awarded after they have finished being assessed.
