Earlier this month, Times columnist James Marriott published his ominously titled polemic The New Dark Ages: The End of Reading and the Dawn of a Post-Literate Society. His argument chimes with a series of recent reports on reading habits in the era of screens: in a recent National Literacy Trust (NLT) survey, just 9.8% of boys aged 14 to 16 report reading daily for pleasure in their free time.
And yet, the UK’s 15-year-olds tested on reading comprehension in the OECD’s latest programme for international student assessment (Pisa) did pretty well: amid a decline in reading performance globally, UK students read just as well in 2025 as they did three years prior, when the tests were last run. Though, the positive result is largely due to England’s performance – Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales all saw a decline.
Of all 91 countries and regions tested, just three outperformed England when it came to reading: Singapore, Taiwan, and the Chinese regions of Beijing, Shanghai, Jiangsu and Zhejiang. England performed better than Australia, Canada, Hong Kong, Finland, Switzerland, Sweden, Germany, Denmark, Norway, France and the Netherlands, among others.
The NLT’s director of education, Andrew Ettinger, says it is “encouraging” that the UK’s reading performance has remained “broadly stable since 2022, at a time when other countries have seen a decline”. However, he adds: “Little has changed for the one in five that still do not reach the baseline level of reading proficiency needed to thrive.”
The Pisa data also showed a continued gender gap around the world, with girls outperforming boys for reading (though the gap in England has narrowed since 2015).
How has England held out against the more general decline? In the years leading up to 2025, the country has seen “initiatives focused on reading improvement, particularly the idea of reading to learn”, says Mary Richardson, lead author of the Wales and Northern Ireland Pisa reports and a professor of educational assessment at UCL. However, these have come in “relatively recently”, she explains, so it’s hard to claim they’ve had an impact yet.
While it might be tempting to look to Covid measures to help explain different outcomes between countries, Richardson says we should be cautious about claiming that “what our government did to ‘manage’ education at that time was enough”.
“We can’t claim to have a perfect system, but what we do was maintained, whereas other jurisdictions might have taken their eyes off the ball and focused more on mathematics and science to the detriment of reading outcomes,” she adds.
Richardson underlines that Pisa is “only one test”. Gemma Moss, professor of literacy at UCL, adds that the Pisa results are difficult to analyse in part because different passages are used for testing in different languages, rather than the same passage being translated.
Responding to the report, the Department for Education said that “strong results are not an argument for standing still”, adding: “We don’t want to go up in the international league tables solely because other countries are declining. Other countries have continued to improve despite the pandemic, while too many young people here are still being left behind.”
However, Prof Becky Francis, who led the government’s curriculum review in England, published last year, said the Pisa results told a “positive story about our school system and the hard work of teachers and school leaders”, adding that the scores suggest “there are important things our education system is getting right”.
Photograph: Christopher Thomond
