Boys falling further behind girls on reading during lockdown, study suggests
BOYS have fallen further behind girls at reading regularly and enjoying it during lockdown, a study says, prompting fears that boys could be at “risk of losing out” due to the pandemic.
Greater access to audiobooks at school and home may help re-engage boys with literacy, the report from the National Literacy Trust (NLT) and Puffin says, as findings suggest they are more popular with boys.
Fiona Evans, director of schools programmes at the NLT, has called for more schools to introduce “audio libraries” – and for fathers and grandfathers to be role models – to encourage more reading among boys.
The research, based on surveys of children aged 8 to 18 in the UK before and during lockdown, found that more girls and boys have been reading daily and have said they are enjoying reading at home.
But the reading enjoyment gap between boys and girls has increased five-fold – from just over a 2% difference at the start of 2020 to an 11.5% difference during lockdown.
Three in five girls (60.2%) said they enjoyed reading during lockdown, compared to 48.9% before, but only 48.7% of boys said they enjoyed reading amid the pandemic, compared to 46.6% pre-lockdown.
More girls than boys said they read daily in their free time before the lockdown and this trend has continued, with the gap between boys and girls in terms of their daily reading widening in the past months.
“It remains to be seen whether these changes are sustained or whether a return to school and a degree of known-normality will help boys catch up,” the report concludes.
But slightly more boys (25%) than girls (22.4%) said they had listened to audiobooks more during lockdown, and more than half these boys said it had made them more interested in reading.
The “cool factor” of audiobooks is likely to have played a part with boys, Ms Evans said, as they can listen on their phone with headphones and do not have to share what they have chosen to read.
Ms Evans said the “power of role models” is really important, and she called on fathers and grandfathers to be “explicit” with boys in their family about what they like to read.
A total of 58,346 children aged nine to 18 in the UK were surveyed
between January and mid-March 2020; then 4,141 children aged eight to 18 were surveyed between May and early June 2020.
Some children in the study said they enjoyed reading more because their parents were around more during lockdown, while others said they had liked reading stories to their grandparents over video calls.
The survey also found that nearly three in five (59%) children said that reading has made them feel better during the lockdown and 50% said that reading inspired them to dream about the future.