The authors conducted their latest National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey between January and mid-March 2020. This Annual Literacy Survey was their most popular to date, with 58,346 children and young people aged 9 to 18 from 315 UK schools participating. This year they also asked a few questions to explore the extent to which children and…

This report outlines findings from questions included in the National Literacy Trust's Annual Literacy Survey in early 2021 to explore children and young people's literacy-related interactions in relation to video game playing. The survey reached 42,502 children and young people aged 8 to 18 between January and mid-March 2021, during the third…

Listening to children's experiences of writing during the first lockdown in spring 2020, it became clear that for many it had been a time of increased creativity, with children writing everything from songs and stories to scripts, and some even beginning their own novels. Another prominent theme in the research last summer was that having more…

Research has shown that book ownership has a significant impact on life outcomes. In 2019, we found that that children who reported that they had a book of their own were not only more engaged with reading but also six times more likely to read above the level expected for their age than children who did not own a book (22% vs. 3.6%). We included…

The National Literacy Trust's research during the first national lockdown in spring 2020 showed that more children and young people said that they enjoyed reading and more read more often during lockdown compared with before the pandemic. Children and young people's comments suggested that this was because they suddenly had time to (re)engage with…

Children and young people's enjoyment of writing is at almost its lowest level in a decade. Although there has been some improvement since 2019, and a significant jump in the number of children writing daily outside school, there is still work to be done. Since the onset of the global pandemic and lockdown, there has been a blurring of the…

The conversation around reluctant readers continues to focus on boys, with research, practice and policy exploring what could be done to (re)engage boys in reading (see National Literacy Trust, 2012; Department for Education, 2019; OECD, 2021). Girls who don't enjoy reading or who don't read in their free time are seldom the focus of interest,…

This report outlines findings from the National Literacy Trust's tenth Annual Literacy Survey relating to children and young people's reading in 2020, in addition to findings from the Trust's survey of children and young people's reading during the COVID-19 lockdown. 58,346 children and young people aged 9 to 18 in the UK took part in the Annual…

Audiobooks have become increasingly popular in the digital age: streaming and subscription services, such as Audible and Spotify, have made audio stories available to a wide commercial audience, while apps like Libby and BorrowBox facilitate 'borrowing' of audiobooks from library services. With access easier and more widespread than ever, it is…

Video games are a significant cultural and creative force, often involving a number of art forms, including narrative, design and audio composition. They have been the subject of a large-scale exhibition at the Victoria and Albert museums in London and Dundee, while the British Games Institute (BGI) was set up to support video game culture in…