Reading Starts - An appeal for action

Sugar Plums Danced In Their Heads - Chris Dunn

An introduction and declaration of intent.

This is a direct appeal to anyone with very young children, and an attempt to start a movement readingstarts.org

I’m not an academic or a teacher. I’m a grandfather who loves stories and am currently watching my grandson fall in love with stories before he can read a word.

My generation is one that knew a world before the smartphone, and I am convinced that putting a screen in front a child too early is incredibly damaging, and that at the moment, the screen is getting there first.

However that race can be beaten, and I very much support the work of Smart Phone Free Childhood, but also, I think there is more that can be done, and that is to get a child to fall in love with story and in turn learning by reading to them from a very early age. To this end I went looking for the evidence to support my argument. I found it, in study after study. Reading Starts is my attempt to put that evidence in front of parents plainly, without blame, and alongside those already working to give children a better start. I’d welcome your thoughts, especially where you disagree.

At time of writing, 28^th September 2026, readingstarts.org is still at a very early stage of development, and currently pledges CANNOT be made. In the meantime, do please subscribe to be kept up to date as to how the movement devleops and show support. This article outlines the problem and suggests a solution.

Feedback and suggestions very welcome
in the comments section at the end of the article

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Reading Starts Years Before The Page

Children who love stories become children who want to read. Children who want to read, read for pleasure and learn more, across a lifetime. And the love of story that starts this chain is laid down before a child can read a word, by listening. That is the whole argument of Reading Starts. What follows is the evidence.

Where we are

Children’s reading for pleasure has been falling for more than a decade, in the UK and across the English-speaking world.

In the UK, 36.1% of 8- to 18-year-olds told the National Literacy Trust in 2026 that they enjoy reading in their free time. In 2016 the figure was 58.6%. This year’s number is a small rise from 32.7% in 2025, the lowest since the survey began in 2005, and only one child in five reads daily. Among 5- to 8-year-olds enjoyment is still high, at 61.6%, but it slipped again this year, driven by boys.

In the United States, 14% of 13-year-olds read for fun almost every day in 2023, against 27% in 2012 and 35% in 1984. Among 9-year-olds the figure fell from 53% in 2012 to 39% in 2022.

In Australia, the share of 15-year-old boys who never read for enjoyment rose to 53% between 2000 and 2018.

Reading to children is also in decline. In 2024, 41% of UK parents of children aged 0 to 4 read aloud to them frequently, down from 64% in 2012. Only 29% of boys aged 0 to 2 were read to daily, against 44% of girls. Fewer than half of parents said reading aloud is fun for them, and 29% of children aged 5 to 13 now describe reading as more a subject to learn than something they do for fun.

None of this describes parents who have stopped caring. It describes a habit that has quietly become rarer, and a generation of parents who never knew how important it was.

Before the page: listening as a foundation

Reading has two parts, and only one of them is learned from the page. The Simple View of Reading, proposed by Gough and Tunmer in 1986 and adopted in England by the Rose Review in 2006, puts it as a formula: reading comprehension equals decoding multiplied by language comprehension.

Phonics teaches the first. The second, meaning vocabulary, grammar, and the ability to follow a spoken narrative, is foundational at the level of listening, and is laid down years earlier than the page.

And books often carry richer language than conversation. Typical children’s books contain about 31 rare words per thousand, against 17 in everyday speech between university-educated adults. A child who is read to hears words that ordinary family spoken interaction rarely supplies.

The word and context volume adds up. Researchers at Ohio State University in 2019 estimated that a child who had a picture book read to them every day hears around 290,000 more words by age five than a child who is rarely read to. At five books a day, the gap passes 1.4 million.

And the effect shows in the brain. In a 2015 imaging study, 3 to 5-year-olds with more reading at home showed greater activity in areas that handle meaning and mental imagery while they listened to a story. The link held after allowing for family household income. It was a small study of 19 children, but it points in the same direction as the behavioural research.

And the head start compounds. A 2011 meta-analysis of 99 studies found that exposure to books explained 12% of the variation in oral language skills among preschool children, rising to 34% among university students. Its authors describe shared reading to children who cannot yet read as the start of that upward spiral.

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The screen got there first

Somewhere in the last fifteen years, the screen began arriving before the book. In the UK, 98% of two-year-olds now watch screens every day. In the United States, 40% of children have their own tablet by the age of two, and 58% by four. About one in five American children use a device to calm down, at mealtimes or to fall asleep, the last of which is the slot that once belonged to the bedtime story.

No parent planned this. The tablet became the easiest way through a meal, a car journey or a long evening, and nobody said what the screen time was replacing. The research now does. An Australian study recorded toddlers’ home language for sixteen hours at a stretch. At age three, each extra minute of screen time corresponded with 6.6 fewer words heard from an adult along with fewer back-and-forth exchanges. At the study’s average of nearly three hours a day, that comes to more than a thousand words a day. In England, two-year-olds with the heaviest screen use, around five hours a day, could say significantly fewer words than those with the lightest screen use.

In March 2026 the UK government published its first screen-time guidance for under-fives. It advises no solo screen time before two, no more than an hour a day from two to five, and ‘screen swaps’: putting the screen down to read a story together.

Smartphone Free Childhood has shown what parents can do together to hold back the smartphone until the end of Year 9. Reading Starts is about the years before that, and what fills the space the screen would otherwise take. The two belong together. One asks parents and children to wait. The other offers them something worth doing instead.

From listening to reading: wanting to read

As obvious as it sounds, children who enjoy reading are the ones who read. Among UK children who enjoy reading, 49.8% read daily in their free time. Among those who do not enjoy reading, the figure is 4.5%.

Children who read for pleasure, in turn, read with improved understanding. When the OECD (Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development) studied 15-year-olds in 32 countries in 2000, reading engagement was more closely linked to reading achievement than socio-economic background was. Being an enthusiastic, frequent reader was a bigger advantage than having well-educated parents, and the OECD concluded that engaging children in reading they enjoyed, may be one of the most effective levers for social change. The pattern has held since. In the US in 2023, 13-year-olds who read for fun almost every day had the highest reading scores of any group.

The psychologist Keith Stanovich named what follows – the Matthew effect. Children who read well read more, and so get better still. It compounds. Children who struggle read less, and fall further behind, and the gap widens every year.

What decides which way a child goes? Decoding matters, and good phonics teaching matters. But a child also needs a reason to push through the hard early months of learning to read. I believe the strongest reason is already knowing what is on the other side: a child who has fallen in love with stories by listening comes to the page wanting the key decoding those strange little black symbols. A great deal of the problem is that the 29% of children who now describe reading as a subject to learn, reach the lesson without motivation.

From reading to learning

Reading for pleasure does not only make better readers. It is linked to progress right across the curriculum, and the effect is considerable.

The clearest UK evidence comes from the 1970 British Cohort Study. Researchers at the Institute of Education followed about 6,000 children and compared those from the same backgrounds with the same test scores at 5 and 10 years old. Those who actively read for pleasure made more progress between 10 and 16 years, not only in vocabulary and spelling but in maths. The combined advantage of regular reading was often about four times that of having a parent with a degree. Children who had been read to regularly at age 5 also did better at 16.

The pattern holds elsewhere. A 2023 study of more than 10,000 children in the United States, led from Cambridge and Fudan universities, found that those who began reading for pleasure early had better cognitive scores and academic results in early adolescence, along with better mental health, more sleep and less screen time. Across 27 countries and more than 70,000 people, children who grew up in homes with plenty of books stayed in education about three years longer than children from homes without books, regardless of their parents’ education or class.

Families who read differ from families who don’t in many ways, and this remains true across countries, decades, and research methods. Reading for pleasure keeps turning up as one of the few advantages that cuts across social background.

Learning as story

The human mind has evolved to aborb stories, and this shapes how everything else is learned. Cognitive scientists describe stories as ‘psychologically privileged’: the mind treats them differently from other absorbed material, the brain finding stories easier to understand and easier to remember.

The evidence is consistent. In one study, people remembered about 50% more from stories than from factual passages on similar material. A 2021 meta-analysis of 37 studies and more than 33,000 participants found that information presented as narrative is both better understood and better remembered than the same information set out as explanation. When 209 American 12- and 13-year-olds were taught the science of Galileo or Marie Curie, those who read it as the story of a discovery learned more than those who read it as a textbook account.

So much of what the school asks of children is story. History is story. Science is the story of questions asked and answered, and it is taught best that way. Literature, religion and geography turn on people, places and consequences. And the habits a story trains are the habits every subject needs: holding a long chain of cause and effect in the mind, waiting for the end, and seeing the world through someone else’s eyes.

I should be precise about where this stops though. Not every piece of learning is a story. The times tables, spelling and the steps of a calculation are learned by practice, and good teaching gives them that. The claim is narrower and, I think, stronger: story is the first way a child discovers learning, and it remains the way most of us understand and remember best. A child who has spent years inside stories arrives at school already practised in the kind of attention that learning requires.

The open door: children are already listening

While reading has fallen, listening has grown. In 2026, 47.3% of UK 8- to 18-year-olds listened to audiobooks or podcasts in their free time. In 2024, for the first time, more of them said they enjoyed listening (42.3%) than enjoyed reading (34.6%).

The listening points back towards books. Among children who enjoy listening, 52.4% also enjoy reading, against 36.0% of those who don’t. Nearly two in five say listening has sparked their interest in reading books, and about half say it helps them understand a story or subject and use their imagination, and that their imagination is used more than if they were watching videos.

Listening also reaches the children reading is losing. Boys trail girls in reading enjoyment by more than ten points, but slightly more boys than girls enjoy listening.

Two cautions. Much of this listening is podcasts rather than books, and these are older children’s own reports. Neither figure shows that audio makes readers, but what it does demonstratie is appetite: children who will sit listening to a story are children whose door to reading is still open, and I encountered this myself when reading to 200 plus at Midhurst College in early 2026. You can read that essay here. Real magic is reading, because reading unlocks the power of imagination.

The remedy: how to give children a love of story

Read to a child fifteen minutes of a story each day. In my view, this should be undertaken from approximately 6 to 12 months onwards. Effectively before a child can read.

Read aloud to your child whenever you can. Ideally from a shared book. If that is not possible, then use other audio material. A tired parent who puts on an audiobook has still got a child to listen to a story for fifteen minutes.

Choose books you enjoy too. Fewer than half of parents say reading aloud is fun for them, and a book that bores the reader rarely delights the listener.

Keep going after your child starts to learns to read. Reading aloud does not stop being useful when a child starts to read for themself. Early on, a child can understand far more by listening than they can from reading, and the story keeps the motivation to read alive whilst their skill catches up.

The pledge - Please note. The pledge is not yet available. In the meantime subscribe to show support.

Being able to pledge has not yet been implimented, and as stated earlier, Reading Starts is still in very early stages of development, but when it comes the pledge mechanism will work in a similar way to Smartphone Free Childhood. The Reading Starts pledge is a simple promise: fifteen minutes of a story a day, read to a child under the age of eight. That’s it. Anyone who pledges will simply have their pledge counted and nothing else.

Pledges will most likely be counted by nursery, school and area, and the totals shown openly, so parents can see how many families around them are doing the same.

Nobody is asked to prove anything, and nobody is named for not signing. The count is there to encourage, never to shame. Again Smartphone Free Childhood is the model.

The goal

• Make reading fifteen minutes of story a day to a child as familiar as five a day.

• Bring back the bedtime book. Help reading aloud to under-fives climb back towards the two in three families who did it often in 2012, with boys read to as often as girls.

• Reach the families the reading gap hurts most.

• Put listening and early years storytelling back into the national, and international conversations.

• Listening to a story being read as a recognised first step back on the road to a life long love of reading and learning, and backed by evidence rather than sentiment.

Sources

• National Literacy Trust, Children and young people’s reading in 2026 and Reading for pleasure – enjoyment and daily reading figures, 2016 comparison.

• Fonetti, summary of the NLT 2026 report – daily reading among children who do and don’t enjoy reading.

• National Literacy Trust, Children and young people’s listening in 2024 – listening enjoyment, gender gap, sparking interest in books.

• Teacher Magazine, Audiobooks as a pathway to student reading – 47.3% listening in 2026.

• HarperCollins UK and NielsenIQ BookData, Understanding the Children’s Book Consumer 2024, via The Bump and Fortune – reading aloud to under-fives, boys and girls, ‘subject to learn’.

• National Endowment for the Arts, Federal data on reading for pleasure and School Library Journal on NAEP 2023 – US reading for fun and scores.

• ACER, Australian boys’ and girls’ enjoyment of reading – PISA 2000 to 2018.

• Reading Rockets, The Simple View of Reading – Gough and Tunmer, 1986.

• Cunningham and Stanovich, What reading does for the mind, with Hayes and Ahrens’ rare-word counts via the Marshall Memo.

• Ohio State University, the million word gap – Logan and colleagues, 2019.

• Hutton and colleagues, Home reading environment and brain activation, Pediatrics, 2015.

• Mol and Bus, To read or not to read, Psychological Bulletin, 2011.

• Common Sense Media, The 2025 Common Sense Census: Media Use by Kids Zero to Eight and press release – tablet ownership by age 2 and 4, devices used at mealtimes and to fall asleep.

• Brushe and colleagues, JAMA Pediatrics, 2024, via The Kids Research Institute Australia and MDedge – screen time and words heard at age three.

• Children of the 2020s study, via Safeguarding Network – 98% of two-year-olds watch screens daily; heaviest users say fewer words.

• UK Government, Screen time for under-5s (Best Start in Life) and the Early Years Screen Time Advisory Group report, March 2026, with coverage in Early Years Alliance – guidance limits and screen swaps.

• Smartphone Free Childhood, The Parent Pact – delaying smartphones until at least 14 (end of Year 9) and social media until 16.

• OECD, Reading for Change, 2002, via Education Week and the ECER summary.

• Centre for Longitudinal Studies, Reading for pleasure and cognitive development and IOE research briefing 106 – Sullivan and Brown.

• Sun, Sahakian and colleagues, Early-initiated childhood reading for pleasure, Psychological Medicine, 2023.

• Evans and colleagues, Family scholarly culture and educational success, 2010.

Willingham, The privileged status of story, American Educator, 2004; Graesser’s recall study via SecEd; Mar and colleagues’ 2021 meta-analysis via Learning and the Brain; Arya and Maul via APS.

Being able to pledge is coming. Subscribe now to show your support, and to be among the first to take it.