On the 17th of June 2026, the National Literacy Trust published a report entitled ‘Why Children and Young People Do or Do Not Engage with Writing in Their Free Time’ [LINK].
The mission of The Writing For Pleasure Centre is to help all young people become passionate and successful writers. As a think tank for exploring what world-class writing is and could be, a crucial part of our work is analysing emerging research and reports.
The NLT’s report makes for sobering reading. Drawing on written responses from 55,075 children and young people aged 8-18, Why Children and Young People Do or Do Not Engage with Writing in Their Free Time sets out to understand, in young writers’ own words, why so many of them are switching off from writing.
The headline numbers are pretty stark:
- Writing enjoyment in free time has almost halved in fifteen years.
- At the end of KS2 in England, 28% of pupils did not meet the expected standard in writing, rising to 41% among disadvantaged pupils.
What makes this report especially enlightening is its method. Rather than asking whether children and young people enjoy writing, the NLT has asked why, and even built a model of writing engagement directly from what the students said.
The research team identified three types of volitional writers: keen writers, ambivalent writers and averse writers. From the themes that emerged, they built a model organised around four interacting domains:
- Behavioural. These are the writerly habits and routines children establish.
- Affective. This is the emotional feelings that can come with writing: enjoyment, anxiety, pride, frustration, identity.
- Cognitive. The thinking that’s involved in writing. From generating ideas to remembering the mechanics of spelling and handwriting.
- Social. The people, audiences and contexts that influence a child’s writerly life.
Just as we point out in our book Engaging Writing Teaching [LINK], the NLT’s report insists that these domains aren’t separate entities. A pupil who feels emotionally connected to their writing (affective engagement) is more likely to sustain effort (behavioural engagement) and think deeply about possible improvements (cognitive engagement). Likewise, a sense of belonging within a writing community (social engagement) can amplify confidence, motivation and persistence.
Understanding engagement through this multidimensional lens helps us, as teachers, see writing not as a solitary act but as a complex blend of doing, feeling, thinking and relating to others. It reminds us that when pupils disengage from free-time writing it is not a matter of laziness or indifference but perhaps a signal that one or more of these dimensions is missing or is underdeveloped.
What do we know about these keen, ambivalent and averse writers?
The NLT’s three groups aren’t neatly separate types of child so much as three points on a continuum, and the report is careful to stress that children move along it.
Keen writers describe writing as being an extension of their identity, creativity and emotions. Autonomy is central here. The majority of this group said being supported to choose what they write about, and what style they want to write it in, motivates them. As one student put it, ‘Writing makes me feel at home and brings me closer to myself.’ Notably, girls, younger children, and pupils receiving free school meals were all overrepresented in the keen writers group.
Ambivalent writers are the largest and most volatile group. Their relationship with writing can fluctuate: enjoyable when they have chosen a topic that aligns with their interests or when there is a real audience, but easily disrupted by fragile confidence, the effort writing demands, or the competing pressures on their time. The report identifies a recurring tension in this group between strong cognitive and creative interest in writing and a frustration in their inability to sustain it once their writing project starts to feel effortful. This appears to be particularly the case when it comes to things like spelling, handwriting and translating their ideas into text.
Averse writers show the deepest disengagement. Averse writers are more likely to be older pupils and boys (44% of boys identified as averse, compared with 27% of girls). For this group, writing is basically associated with school-based obligation and compliance, and, as a result, is very rarely self-initiated. Negative experiences with school-based writing tasks come up repeatedly as the point at which any residual enjoyment from writing was extinguished.
Where these findings meet what we already know
For readers familiar with our Writing For Pleasure approach, several threads in this report will land as strong corroboration rather than new information.
Keen writers understand the purposes for writing in ways their peers perhaps don’t. To develop a class of keen writers is to help them realise that writing allows us to make and share meaning. These are meanings we are eager to commit to paper and share with others. When we support children to choose their own writing ideas within the parameters of a class writing project, we help them choose something they are keen to write about. When they are keen on their topic, they are keen to learn how they can write about it well. When we explicitly teach children how to generate and choose their own writing ideas for class writing projects, we are also giving them the skills to do this in their free-time writing too.
A lack of writing fluency is doing major damage. The cognitive domain findings among ambivalent and averse writers repeatedly describe spelling, handwriting and translating ideas into text as feeling incredibly effortful. This is precisely the dynamic captured in our Writing Map development model, in which developing children’s writing fluency is seen as an instructional priority. Without such fluency, strain at the transcription level makes writing feel effortful (even painful) and draws cognitive resources away from the important work of composing something really great. The NLT’s qualitative data gives this aspect of our writing model a human voice.
Real audiences for children’s volitional writing aren’t extras. Across all three groups, the presence of genuine and supportive audiences was seen as essential. For averse writers, the absence of real audiences renders their writing as ‘purposeless’. For the keen writers, real audiences and pursuing their own authentic purposes were described as actively sustaining their motivation to write. This squares closely with our principles that children need to write for real reasons and real readers, not solely for a teacher-evaluation [see this LINK for ideas on how you can bring real audiences to children’s free-time writing].
Poorly designed school writing practices are undermining pupils’ free-time writing engagement. Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding for policymakers is how frequently children, especially older, averse writers, trace their disengagement directly to the controlling, compliance-based and assessment-heavy writing practices used in their schools.
Being economically underserved doesn’t predict disengagement. Children receiving free school meals are more represented among keen writers than their peers, not less. This contradicts any lazy narratives that try to link socioeconomic disadvantage to writing aversion (These kids haven’t got any experiences – they haven’t got anything to write about…) [LINK for more on this].
What this means for classroom practice
- Teach for authorial agency. Explicitly teach children idea generation strategies during your class writing projects so that they can use them in their free time writing too [LINK and LINK to learn about these strategies].
- Give their volitional writing somewhere to go. Audiences beyond the teacher (peers, younger pupils, families, school publications, online platforms, people beyond the classroom) consistently appear where engagement is highest, and their absence where it’s lowest.
- Check children’s writing fluency. Where handwriting, spelling and writing fluency are adding cognitive load, address them quickly through explicit teaching, assessment and intervention [LINK for more details on this].
For more, consider purchasing our eBook Engaging Writing Teaching. Remember, all our books and resources are free for members. To become a member, sign up here.
