Every year the National Literacy Trust asks children and young people across the UK how they feel about reading and writing. Their report Children and young people’s writing in 2026, published on 24 June 2026, draws on 125,375 responses from children and young people aged 5 to 18 at 479 schools. What follows is my short summary of it in my own words, and you can read the full report through the link at the foot of this post.
The headline is a small piece of good news. Just under 3 in 10 (28.7%) children and young people aged 8 to 18 said they enjoyed writing in their free time, up 2.1 percentage points on 2025. Among children aged 5 to 8, enjoyment also rose slightly, to 61.7%, although it is still well below where it was before 2019.
Enjoyment falls as children get older. It is at its lowest between the ages of 11 and 16, then picks up a little between 16 and 18. More girls than boys enjoyed writing at every age. Children receiving free school meals were more likely to enjoy writing than their peers, a pattern the Trust has seen for many years.
Writing every day for fun is still unusual. Just over 1 in 9 (11.9%) of those aged 8 to 18 wrote something daily in their free time, up from 10.4% in 2025. That is a welcome rise, but daily writing has fallen by 15.1 percentage points since 2010. Younger children write most often: nearly 2 in 5 of those aged 5 to 8 wrote daily.
Confidence tells a more hopeful story. Around 2 in 3 children and young people aged 8 to 18 described themselves as confident or very confident writers. Confidence is highest in younger children, dips through the teenage years and rises a little again at 16 to 18.
The report also looks at the different ways children choose to write in their own time. The Trust’s conclusion is that writing still plays “an active role in many young people’s everyday experiences”, often in forms that sit outside the usual idea of writing for pleasure. The challenge, as they see it, is not only getting children to write more often, but helping them find value, relevance and confidence in writing as part of daily life.
What this means for families
For a child who finds spelling or handwriting hard, writing can feel like the part of school that shows them up. It is no surprise that enjoyment dips just as the demands of secondary school grow.
Writing for fun does not have to look like schoolwork. Messages, shopping lists, comic strips, captions for photos, a diary, song lyrics, or a story typed or dictated into a tablet all count, and all of them build the habit. Notice what your child is happy to write, give them more of it, and praise the ideas before the spelling.
If the gap between what your child can say out loud and what they manage on paper seems wide, that is worth looking into. A learning needs assessment can show where the difficulty sits, and structured 1-to-1 support can build both skill and confidence.
My thanks to the National Literacy Trust for this research and for sharing it so openly. The full report is well worth a read.