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Original poster

To be shocked that the national average reading age is 9-11

353 replies

SailorSerena · 06/02/2025 22:54

I often think why are people finding this confusing? It's not difficult! Did any of these posters even read the OP!? When reading threads here. On another thread I saw someone say so you know what the national average reading age is? When peoples comprehension was criticised. So I googled it. And I'm appalled!

How on earth is the UKs reading ability so poor that the average adult has the reading ability of a 10 year old child!?

OP posts:
Meadowfinch · 07/02/2025 00:49

If it is true, no surprise at all..

Many people don't read anything more taxing than a road sign after they leave school. Only a small proportion read for pleasure, and their abilities decline from 16 onwards.

HereComesEverybody · 07/02/2025 00:53

I think phones & devices are hugely detrimental to reading (totally not missing the irony of being on my phone to read mn & post this 🤔)

I read a lot & always have done.

ForeverDelayedEpiphany · 07/02/2025 00:55

myhotwaterbottle · 07/02/2025 00:03

Reading isn't just reading words and understanding them. Reading is a complex skill and true understanding is all about the comprehension of a text.

I have worked with many functionally illiterate adults. Yes they can read things in their day to day environment, yes they can get by, they can send and read texts messages, use social media, understand simple letters. They cannot however comprehend anything with deeper complexity. They can read the words but that doesn't mean they truly understand. Wittgenstein said "if a lion could speak English we would not understand him."

Some people achieve a primary school level of education in English and then cannot function higher than this. I have had the pain of trying to teach a class of young adults reading Of Mice and Men. Of course they could read the words, but could they understand the text on a deeper level? Absolutely not. They had to be spoon fed absolutely everything, and for most of it I may as well have been trying to communicate with a lion. The world of a functionally illiterate adult is different to that of a genuinely literate adult. I think until you really work with people like that it can be hard to understand.

I remember showing my father some of the essays I had written that received good marks at university. He's an intelligent but not university educated man. He could read and understand, he was interested, anything he didn't immediately follow he asked me about. Compare with his father... an uneducated man who left school at 14. He can read, but he would never be able to understand the essays. If you asked him to read them aloud, he could of course do that. But it might as well have been written in French. He wouldn't have even known where to begin to ask questions about it.

Absolutely this. I'd say that after my head injury, I actually almost lost my ability to completely understand what i was reading at times, in spite of getting a grade B at A' level English, and reading classic literature alongside university texts. It's difficult to explain but in some ways it is like the basic idea is there and the words make sense, but sometimes it feels like my brain can't process the underlying themes or comprehend the complex nuances or meaning within the text and prose.

It is incredibly difficult at times but I keep on keeping on.

ChessorBuckaroo · 07/02/2025 00:58

Angrymum22 · 07/02/2025 00:03

I remember reading somewhere that the tabloids were aimed at a reading age of 7-8. It shocked me at the time but doesn’t surprise me now.

I’ve learned, after some years on MN not to over complicate posts because they are often misinterpreted. Not suggesting that MNetters struggle with reading but like verbal interactions they often don’t “listen” to what is being said/written.

An average reading age of 10 also means that half the population have a reading age lower than 10. Some will be due to dyslexia and other SEN but others will be due to illiteracy.

One of the most popular series of books recently was “Fifty shades”, for some women I know it was the only series of books they have ever read. The author had been very clever to target the average reader.

JKR’s Harry Potter series was aimed at 10yr olds but was very popular with adults probably because it was an easy read. However, Tolkien’s “Lord of the Rings” is aimed at the more advanced reader. So people are often disappointed when they attempt it after watching the films. DS was an advanced reader, he read the final book of the trilogy at age 10 because he wanted to know what happened while waiting for the final film to be released on TV.

Some people are readers and some are not. Like most pastimes the more you engage the better you become. I spent my childhood immersed in books. My mum would ban me from reading after midnight because I would happily read all night as a child.
Now I struggle to stay awake so have started using Audiobooks, I’ve just started listening to “Normal Women” by Phillipa Gregory. It is fascinating.

I was a reader of books when I was younger, Roald Dahl especially whose works I devoured, but after that not much. There are too many distractions now for the average person to want to sit down and quietly read a book for an hour or two.

*I say book as we all constantly read online now.

Scissor · 07/02/2025 00:58

Maximum assessment of reading age in most tests is 16.
An average reading age of 8/9 would therefore be around the top of the bell curve so explain the pitch of newspapers in the day.
Plenty of people in the UK are functioning well enough... I've met a few completely illiterate and it's incredibly difficult for them. Mostly extremely adept at hiding it and there's no obvious way for them to learn as adults.

whatkatydid2014 · 07/02/2025 00:59

That surprises me. Everyone I know well enough to have discussed it with at all (family, school mum friends, old school/uni friends, cub leaders, colleagues, neighbours) does some reading for pleasure. Maybe nothing massively challenging but taking a bestseller novel or two on holiday is pretty ubiquitous in my circle. I think it’s a lot more common to struggle with technical/scientific texts than news articles and novels, though I accept some literature is a lot more challenging than your average bestseller.

cocoloco23 · 07/02/2025 01:00

InfoSecInTheCity · 07/02/2025 00:23

A decade ago I worked on a project that required putting together comms that were accessible to all adults across the UK and one of the requirements from the Govt dept that commissioned it was that all written English needed to be at or below Entry Level 3 (roughly year 6 at school so 11yrs old) because that was the national average attainment for Literacy skills.

This isn't new and unfortunately it seems there's been little improvement in the last 10 years.

Yes, that’s still the requirement for all text on government websites in the UK. This is what I do for a living and it’s really difficult to make complex information that simple.

DearestItIsSnowing · 07/02/2025 01:05

Scissor · 07/02/2025 00:58

Maximum assessment of reading age in most tests is 16.
An average reading age of 8/9 would therefore be around the top of the bell curve so explain the pitch of newspapers in the day.
Plenty of people in the UK are functioning well enough... I've met a few completely illiterate and it's incredibly difficult for them. Mostly extremely adept at hiding it and there's no obvious way for them to learn as adults.

I don’t think Statistics works like that…

1 There will be bunching at the maximum.
2 That would mean an equal number of people with a reading age of 0 as 16.

DearestItIsSnowing · 07/02/2025 01:09

I do know what you mean about some people not being able to read or write well, with it not being apparent unless something comes up which needs them to send someone a note, for example.

DearestItIsSnowing · 07/02/2025 01:17

Is anyone else old enough to remember the BBC literacy drive which was on TV in the 1970s? On the move. Perhaps it’s time for another.

Also, I haven’t watched Coronation Street for a long time, but didn’t Tim Metcalfe have a literacy problem? The link says was a storyline for a while in 2014-2015.

Edited to add a link to Wikipedia on On the Move.

ChampagneLassie · 07/02/2025 04:28

Solocatmum · 07/02/2025 00:45

It’s sad but not surprising.

It is also really quite easy to fall into that category. At age 18 when I was tested for dyslexia, my reading age was 11 (despite a fairly high IQ). I could not read a broadsheet newspaper but had got through school without it being flagged as a particular concern because I was so good at maths (so no one worried about my English).

I was very lucky as I got tested, diagnosed, and then got lots of extra help at uni. But most people don’t get that, and remain at that level.

they’ll be huge swathes of people with a low reading age for a variety of reasons. I do wonder whether some of the problem is that the focus in English at secondary. I recall it being lots of stuff around poetry and analysing language - and far too little on the basics of sentence construction and spelling.

I also got tested and diagnosed at Uni…and simmarly I scored very high for maths/reasoning and struggle much more with text. I only learnt to read age 10 but I rapidly caught up. annoyingly I’d enrolled on a humanities degree I really should have studied maths or sciences. I think I’ve got very good comprehension/decoding (although I think I’m probably slower than average) I only really struggle trying to write docs longer than say 1 A4 page.

ProjectKettle · 07/02/2025 04:34

I did a course at work on communicating with the public that talked about this. There's a website called the Hemingway Editor which they told us about - you can copy your text into it and it analyses it and gives you a reading level. It opened my eyes a bit to just how much I needed to simplify what I was writing to be of benefit to the majority of people. Especially as i work in quite a technical area so easy to fall into jargon.

https://hemingwayapp.com/

Hemingway Editor

Hemingway Editor makes your writing bold and clear.

https://hemingwayapp.com

Oblomov25 · 07/02/2025 05:04

And? This is well known. Used to be 11, is now 9. So? Most of mn users it's higher, my ds's it is higher, thus my job is done.

junebirthdaygirl · 07/02/2025 05:31

My dad left school at 14. He could read anything and read autobiographies all his life. He also read the newspaper, cover to cover every day. I think kids those days had a far higher standard leaving Primary than today. My dm left at 15 and had an amazing capacity to read, write business letters and generally had a very high standard of literacy. This was a 40s education for both. I know some fell through the cracks but the whole education system seems to have dumbed down. I am shocked, sometimes , watching quizzes where people do not know the basic rivers and mountains of their own country. And these are people who enter a quiz as they feel they know stuff so l dread to think what the rest of the population is like.
It is interesting hearing how government documents focus on a lower reading age to be inclusive. I suppose when you are looking at average you need to be aware many people have English as their second language and also some cultures have very little education. So overall the standard drops.

myhotwaterbottle · 07/02/2025 05:44

whatkatydid2014 · 07/02/2025 00:59

That surprises me. Everyone I know well enough to have discussed it with at all (family, school mum friends, old school/uni friends, cub leaders, colleagues, neighbours) does some reading for pleasure. Maybe nothing massively challenging but taking a bestseller novel or two on holiday is pretty ubiquitous in my circle. I think it’s a lot more common to struggle with technical/scientific texts than news articles and novels, though I accept some literature is a lot more challenging than your average bestseller.

With all due respect you are not mixing in the circles that are functionally illiterate so of course they're not going to struggle to read. Why does it surprise you based on your circle of friends? You are clearly not socialising with the parts of society who have never picked up a novel or even gone anywhere outwith their own town or city, let alone taken a book on holiday.

BarkLife · 07/02/2025 05:51

HangryLikeTheHulk · 06/02/2025 23:00

The UK is a deeply anti-intellectual country, and most people appear satisfied to gulp on the teat of mass market tv series and blockbuster movies instead of reading. A soothing audio-visual mogadon to help them deal with the grim decline all around them.

It’s not about anti-intellectualism, though. The UK is no less ‘intellectual’ than any other country.

This is about poverty (in all senses: of opportunity, aspiration). Generations of families haven’t learnt to read properly, mainly because of unmet additional needs and lack of help. I teach secondary, where children who cannot read receive extra tuition until they can read, but they’ve missed the window to really access the curriculum.

Our illiteracy rate is actually really low in the UK, but there will always be a section of the population who struggle with reading comprehension.

myhotwaterbottle · 07/02/2025 05:55

HereComesEverybody · 07/02/2025 00:45

This is a sad but very interesting topic..
Do you think the majority of people with low literacy / comprehension skills could improve with more reading practice or is it a case of levelling out & this is where they are now?

There are definitely things that can be done. In Scotland books are given for free to parents to encourage them to read to their children. So many simply don't. Children don't even know nursery rhymes, they aren't sung too. This is foundational. I abhor the decline in nursery rhymes and traditional playground games.

The parts of our society targeted by this have wider reaching problems however. Poverty, drugs, poor housing etc. There are some seriously disadvantaged children out there and giving their parents some books won't change their prospects. More often than not these parents don't know how to even speak to their children. I literally mean that: they don't know how to engage with them naturally in a way that fosters communication and language development.

Blue278 · 07/02/2025 05:56

wipeywipe · 06/02/2025 23:50

I'm not shocked tbh. MNs is meant to attract fairly educated posters & yet sometimes the lack of comprehension is breathtaking.

Those of us who have been here since the beginning have definitely noticed that the increased popularity of the site has destroyed it’s reputation as a refuge for those who appreciate literacy in content.

L1ghtP0ur · 07/02/2025 05:57

Do you know what 10 year olds are expected to be able to do as regards reading now?

myhotwaterbottle · 07/02/2025 05:58

L1ghtP0ur · 07/02/2025 05:57

Do you know what 10 year olds are expected to be able to do as regards reading now?

What is your point?

Simonjt · 07/02/2025 06:00

I’m shocked people are shocked, English isn’t my first language, so due to that both my reading and writing age would appear lower in a test situation as I need a bit more processing time. People forget that reading age isn’t a measure of basic word reading, its about fully understanding that has been written.

It also isn’t a huge surprise since education doesn’t seem to be valued in the UK, for example the amount of people who are both loud and proud about their lack of maths skills.

L1ghtP0ur · 07/02/2025 06:03

myhotwaterbottle · 07/02/2025 05:58

What is your point?

Show quote history

My point is I’m not sure saying reading to the standard of a 10year old means somebody has poor literacy.

Blue278 · 07/02/2025 06:07

Interesting thread. Not my area and would like to know more about the testing methods.

If it is not about literally being able to decode the written word and more related to comprehension, then isn’t it more of a general intelligence test? The ability to analyse and understand. You can’t teach intelligence.

One of my favourite sayings is ‘think of the average person and remember 50% are more stupid than that’.

Blue278 · 07/02/2025 06:10

On a positive note, a few centuries ago the majority of the population would have been illiterate. So we’ve done quite well really.

The Taliban know what they’re doing preventing women from being educated. Imagine being limited to the extent you can only hear what your husband and religious leaders allow you to hear.

Literacy is so powerful.