National Literacy Trust Hubs are place-based approaches serving 20 communities across the UK where patterns of intergenerational poverty and low literacy are impacting people’s lives. 14 of these areas are part of Connecting Stories, an Arts Council England-funded programme. Our work operates at two levels: area-wide and a focus on a few of the most deprived wards in each Hub – our ‘high-priority wards’.
This report, along with previous evaluation of our work, has found that children and young people in schools closely involved in our work (high-priority wards) reported higher levels of reading enjoyment compared with their peers both in our wider Hub areas (characterised by our community-level work) and across England as a whole. This is within a context of a dramatic decrease in reading and writing enjoyment and frequency in children and young people across the UK between 2023 and 2024.
Key Findings
To explore literacy-engagement levels in children and young people taking part in our work in communities facing high economic disadvantage, we used data gathered through our Annual Literacy Survey of children and young people aged 8 to 18.
The report focuses on 60,773 8- to 16-year-olds across England. 6.9% (n = 4,189) attended schools in our high-priority wards, 29.8% (n = 18,116) came from schools within our 14 Hub areas and 63.3% (n = 38,468) from schools not within our Hubs, nor within our high-priority wards (referred to as ‘National’, and relating to England only). Responses from children and young people in high-priority wards show differences in reading engagement compared with those in wider Hub areas and nationally:
Enjoying reading in free time
- In 2024, 2 in 5 (41.8%) children and young people who attended schools in our high-priority areas told us that they enjoyed reading in their free time, compared with 1 in 3 in our wider Hub areas (34.8%) and across the whole of England (34.2%).
- Reading enjoyment in free time decreased across all groups between 2023 and 2024. However, the drop for children and young people in our high-priority areas was half of that seen at the national level (-4.5 percentage points vs -9.5 percentage points).
- Our work in high-priority areas appeared to ‘protect’ young people of secondary-school age, for whom we saw the biggest drop in our overall national data between 2023 and 2024. For example, there was a 12.3 percentage-point drop in levels of reading enjoyment for 14 to 16s nationally, but an increase of 1.4 percentage points for this group in high-priority schools.
- Similarly, the decrease in reading-enjoyment levels between 2023 and 2024 for those who received free school meals (FSMs) was much smaller in our high-priority schools (-0.2 percentage points) than nationally (-5.7 points). For those who didn’t receive FSMs, the drop was half of that seen nationally (-5.0pp vs -10.0pp), suggesting our work not only supported those who did receive FSMs but also those who did not.
Enjoying reading in school
- 1 in 2 (53.2%) children and young people in our high-priority areas reported enjoying reading at school, compared with 2 in 5 of those in our wider Hubs (42.8%) and in England as a whole (38.2%).
- Again, our work in high-priority areas appeared to ‘protect’ young people of secondary-school age. While levels of enjoyment at school decreased by 8.5 percentage points for 14 to 16s nationally between 2023 and 2024, they increased by 1.2 percentage points in this age group in high-priority schools.
- Finally, between 2023 and 2024, while school reading-enjoyment levels decreased by 0.3 percentage points for those who received FSMs nationally, in our high-priority schools, they increased by 6.9 percentage points.
Taken together, our findings suggest that while the national picture of reading enjoyment is of great concern, levels of reading enjoyment both at school and in free time are either falling less dramatically than the national picture in our high-priority areas or have even increased over the last year. The model of provision in these wards would appear to be delivering valuable support for children and young people’s literacy engagement.