Survey of 300,000 pupils discovers children are choosing books well below their reading age
A year 10 pupil reading in the school
library. Photograph: Graham Turner for the Guardian
There is something "seriously amiss" with the way children are encouraged to
read in secondary school, with many reading books with an average reading age as
much as four years below their actual age, according to a new report which
quizzed more than 300,000 British schoolchildren on their reading habits.
The What Kids
Are Reading report looked at the reading habits of 300,144 children in 1,605
primary and secondary schools in the UK,
finding that children above year six are not challenged enough by the books they
read. While the seven and eight-year-olds in year three were reading books with
an average reading age of 8.8, by year nine, the 13 and 14-year-old students
were reading books with an average age of just 10. Some of the books most read
by students in years nine to 11 included Roald Dahl's Charlie and the Chocolate
Factory, in fourth place, Dahl's The Twits, in 11th place, and two of Jeff
Kinney's Wimpy Kid books, in sixth and nine places.
"The average book
difficulty rises as pupils get older, but not in proportion to the rate at which
the pupils should be improving in reading," says the report, which is in its
fifth year of annual production. "After year six the book difficulty level
flatlines to below the actual age of the pupils, which is alarming … It appears
that there is something seriously amiss with the way secondary
schools encourage young people to read. If the older readers challenged
themselves more, better reading outcomes could be anticipated."
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