A study from the National Literacy Trust (Bonafede et al, 2025) has raised concerns that children and young people’s engagement in writing is at a “crisis point”.
Involving around 115,000 children and young people aged from 5 to 18 and from 515 schools, the study warns that writing enjoyment, motivation and habits are declining.
The findings show that only 27% of those aged 8 to 18 in the research group say they enjoy writing in their free time – marking a huge fall in writing enjoyment over the last 15 years of this research (down from 47% in 2010). Only 10% of the respondents say they write something every day in their free time.
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