Why Have Children and Young People Stopped Writing?
According to new data released by the National Literacy trust on Monday, children and young people’s writing is at a meteoric low. Experts have termed it a crisis point in education history, and many commentators have voiced their concerns about what might happen should the trend continue, and young learners writing for pleasure continues to fall.
The Annual Literacy Survey
The new data is part of the findings of the National Literacy Trust’s Annual Literacy Survey. The Children and Young People’s Writing Report collated 71,351 responses from children and young people between the ages of 5 and 18, and the findings show that enjoyment of writing is at one of the lowest levels evidenced since 2010.
Only 34.6% of learners aged 8-18 reported to enjoy writing in their free time. This figure is a 12.2% decrease over the last thirteen years.
Only 19.3% of children and young people in the same bracket reported to write something on a daily basis in their free time. This figure is a 28.5% decrease over the past thirteen years.
These percentage point slides are huge— and it’s leading educators to worry that should the trend continue, literacy and creativity might struggle on a generational level, as well as compromise the post-16 options and futures of millions of learners.
Why might free-time writing have slipped?
There has been a rise in leisure options over the past decade. Children and young people now have access to more affordable technology, and are more likely to own personal over shared devices, meaning that things like video gaming, watching TV, and communicating with friends might play a part.
The rise of social media might also play a part in why writing for pleasure may have decreased in children and young people: those who a generation ago may have enjoyed writing in their free time might now express their creativity in other ways on social media, which is dominated by video and image blogging in 2023.
It’s also true that learners are likely to be under more stress than they were ten to fifteen years ago. As education programs become more intensive, especially post-Covid, free time becomes earmarked for revising, classwork and decompressing. Writing for pleasure requires a lot of effort, and it’s likely that some learners simply feel it’s not the most relaxing or productive use of their free time.
As a country, we’re also putting a much larger governmental emphasis on STEM subjects, which might mean learners are no longer feeling drawn toward humanities as something that they might want to pursue a career in — and some sources are concerned that this might have a negative impact on working futures.
Young, Female, Welsh and Northern: Who are our young writers?
More girls than boys reported enjoying writing in their free time— 39.5% to 28.9%.
It’s also the younger learners who are still engaging in the most regular writing in their free time, with those aged 5 to 8 leading the pack with a huge 72%. This decreases slowly as learners age, with those aged 14 to 16 being the least dedicated writers at 26.4%.
Free School Meal (FSM) status also seems to play a part in the amount children and young people tend toward writing in their spare time, with those who were in receipt of free school meals reporting to write in their free time daily far more than those who were not; at 23.6% and 17.9% respectively. In terms of geography, the most prolific reports of daily writing came out of Wales (23.5%), the North West (22.8%) and the North East (22.0%)— with the South East (17.2%) and the East of England (18.1%) making up the lows.
Why does it constitute a crisis?
A shift in leisure options doesn’t usually constitute a crisis… but when that leisure option is writing, it might indicate some problematic generational issues are on the horizon.
Writing for pleasure has myriad mental health benefit. It’s all the more important in a decade where children and young people’s mental health is reportedly at an all-time low, with more reports of stress, depression and anxiety-related symptoms than ever before in those under eighteen. Part of this is that learners are now more aware of conditions like these, and can recognise them with more confidence in themselves than learners may have done a decade ago— however, they’ve also probably got more to be stressed about.
Three years of disrupted education due to the pandemic, changes to degree funding structures, economic downturn and parental job precarity, widening social inequalities— it’s not a surprise to any that learners are stressed. It is interesting to note that learners on FSM who have higher changes of experiencing economic deprivation and the associated stresses are some of our more prolific writers.
But it does go deeper than children and young people not being able to explore the benefits of writing for mental health.
Writing for pleasure can often be a vital part of developing the confidence to be creative when it comes to writing in-class and for careers, and should this trend continue, this can compromise the exam and working futures of a generation of learners. If only very few learners are writing for pleasure, then pursuing those subjects with confidence at A-Level, then talent pools for many careers—content and resource creation, journalism, medical writing, law, translation, all levels of humanities teaching— might end up extremely compromised.
Educators especially may be looking at these findings with a little trepidation. Only time will tell what they might mean for learners in the UK as they prepare to enter the working world. You can explore the full datasets in The Children and Young People’s Writing Report, available at the National Literacy Trust.
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