The power of slow reading approaches


Building cognitive patience and deeper engagement in a fast-paced world


The training, resources and research that CLPE has produced for over fifty years demonstrate that to be literate, children need access to high-quality texts and interested adults with whom children can share rich and enjoyable reading experiences and deeper engagement with a variety of written material.


W


E know that being literate not only sets the foundation for better academic


outcomes and improved socio- economic trajectories but that being a reader can also support personal, social and emotional development, enabling better mental health and greater capacity for empathy and critical thinking.


Extensive studies show that volitional reading was a more significant contributor to a child’s educational success than their family’s socio-economic status and it is more important to a child’s cognitive development between the ages of 10 and 16 than their parents’ level of education.


Reading for Pleasure – what we know


Despite the clear benefits volitional reading brings to our children and young people, there are increasing concerns over what is now being termed the reading for pleasure crisis. The most recent National Literacy Trust survey of Children and Young People’s Reading (Clark, Picton, Cole: 2025) reports that reading enjoyment levels are at their lowest since their records began. Just 32.7 per cent of young people aged eight to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time in 2025. And there is continued concern around the “decline by nine”, driven by the Scholastic, Kids and Family Reading Report (2025) which shows a long- term decline in reading enjoyment and the relationship between this


and reading frequency. The PIRLS data often cited by successive governments as a mark of success, is similar now to two decades ago; our children perform highly in their reading proficiency but poorly in terms of their reading engagement compared with other countries. Thousands of children are leaving Primary school having missed out on a significant chunk of their Early Years Foundation Stage education in the school setting due to COVID-19 lockdowns. Teachers continue to share the ongoing impact on these children, not least the loss of early social, emotional and foundational experiences through carefully planned, literate acts that impact on behaviours for learning and well- being let alone the development of a community of readers and writers. Coupled with this is the impact of growing up in a period of accelerated technological change in which childhood has been captured by increased and often fragmented engagement with digital media and screens. Coinciding with this are increased cases of anxiety and a decline in sustained attention span. This decline in attentiveness is deeply concerning not least because it has far-reaching implications for our children’s capacity to think and learn deeply, form relationships, and, ironically, develop the very attributes that will future proof our children for a changing world, i.e. flexibility, criticality, patience, endurance and resilience; attributes that will enable them to contribute as literate individuals within a functioning society.


And we barely need to scratch beneath the surface of the headlines,


Spring-Summer 2026


Anjali Patel – Lead Advisory Teacher at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education (CLPE), a UK-based literacy charity and English Association working to support schools to fulfil every child’s right to be literate.


including statutory school assessment data, to reveal that, in the intersection of multiple disadvantages, socio- economic status has the most significant impact on academic attainment and engagement in both reading and writing. We know that disadvantaged children are less likely to benefit from book ownership and less likely to benefit from a parent able to devote the time to shared reading experiences and the kind of interactions that mitigate


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