Guest writer Brogan Tuxford, Primary School Teacher at St Mary’s School for Girls
I was an avid reader as a child. I went to Narnia and to Hogwarts. I travelled back in time to solve mysteries and visited places far, far away (places that I now understand may not actually exist!). The pursuit of discovering the next adventure, story or world has never left me; it chased me into adulthood and still takes up huge swathes of my time. For me, there’s a childlike joy in being able to abandon reality and curl up within the pages of another world – and I know I’m not alone in that feeling.
But, for many children today, that joy of disappearing into a story seems to be slipping away.
So, it fills me with a hopeless dread when I see the headlines featuring the dwindling statistics of reading for pleasure in our younger generations. In this year’s National Literacy Trust Annual Literacy Survey (2025), it was highlighted that “Just 1 in 3 (32.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said that they enjoyed reading in their free time… This marks a 36% decrease in reading enjoyment levels since we started asking about this in 2005.”
The data is clear: children are reading less for pleasure. There are endless articles analysing why, but what is actually being done to change it? To answer that, we first need to understand the reasons behind it.
Fewer and fewer children are engaging with literature, drawn instead to the infinite, ever-updating world of the internet. With everything at their fingertips – games, videos, social media – books can seem slow and archaic in comparison. The world is your smart phone. To win them back, we have to entice them with something better.
As a teacher, I’ve scoured the studies to piece together what makes choosing to read unappealing – because if we know that, we might be able to reclaim some of the 36% of readers we’ve lost over the past twenty years. One key finding echoed across studies is that a lack of autonomy discourages children from reading. In the latest NLT study, 26.6% of reluctant readers said they valued having the freedom to choose what they read.
It makes perfect sense. It is a feeling universally experienced that when we’re told to do something, our initial instinct is often to resist. Has society made reading too academic? Has it shifted from hobby to chore? And if so, how do we bring it back?
Giving children ownership over the worlds they visit seems like a sensible step in the right direction. I know from experience that being left alone in the public library for half an hour felt like the height of freedom when I was eight. I still get that same feeling in bookshops as an adult. It is a sense of endless potential and possibility.
That sensible step sparked an idea: what if we could bring that magic of book-choosing directly into school?
With this in mind, I approached Red Lion Books about a potential pop-up bookshop in our school. When I’m not reading, I’m teaching – and I’m lucky enough to do that within the walls of St Mary’s Lower School. Red Lion is our main book supplier, sourcing stories for our book club, library and class texts. Reading for pleasure is something we actively promote at St Mary’s, and the friendly faces that make up the Red Lion family share that same passion. It’s a win-win situation – and a great way for us to support our local independent bookseller!
I’m excited to say we’re launching our first St Mary’s × Red Lion Pop-Up at the end of November, just in time for the Christmas break. Children will be able to browse Red Lion’s mobile shelves and choose a book for themselves or as a gift – even with the option to have it wrapped!
My hope is that this event gives children back a sense of ownership over what they read. For the book lovers, it’s another chance to spread their literary wings. For the reluctant readers, I hope it offers a peek into what reading could be – a moment of freedom, curiosity, and choice that belongs entirely to them.