How common it is

A survey of roughly twelve thousand Australian secondary students, Years 7 to 12, across four states.

29% do not read in their free time54% read more than once a week

Figure 1Australian secondary students, Year 7 to Year 12, and reading in their free time. Each square is one student in a hundred. Deakin University, reported via Australia Reads, 2024.

The report shows that 54% of teens read upwards of once a week – with fiction being the most popular genre, and print books being preferenced over other formats. The survey data also shows a significant portion of Australian teens are missing out on access to the benefits of reading for pleasure, with 29% of school students not engaging with reading in their free time.
Deakin University, reported via Australia Reads (2024). Registered as LIT-08.

So: close to a third. If the question underneath your worry is whether something is unusual about your child, the answer is no — roughly one in three Australian secondary students is in the same position, and more than half still read weekly. Both facts are true at once.

What this does not establish

That not reading causes weaker results. This is a survey of what students do, not a study of what follows from it. Students who read for pleasure do tend to perform better on literacy measures, but that association runs in several directions at once: reading may build skill, and having skill certainly makes reading pleasant rather than laborious. Untangling those requires a different kind of study.

You will find pages asserting the causal version confidently. They are usually drawing it from correlational data, and the reading entries in the register are there so you can check what any particular claim actually rests on.

The more precise worry, and it is a fair one

Reading widely is how most people acquire the vocabulary and the sentence patterns that formal writing needs. A student who reads little is not doomed, but they are getting less of the raw material, and they will usually have to build it more deliberately elsewhere. That is a reasonable thing to be concerned about — it is just not the same claim as “not reading makes you fail English”.

Notice also what the same survey found about format: print was preferred over other formats, and fiction was the most popular genre. The common assumption that teenagers have simply migrated to screens for reading is not what these students reported.

What tends to work

Stop prescribing improving books. The 54% who read weekly are reading fiction they chose. A reluctant reader given worthy literature reliably reads nothing.
Short and complete beats long and improving. A finished short story is a reading experience; an abandoned novel teaches a student they cannot read.
Read the same thing they are reading.Having someone to talk to about a book is, for most teenagers, the actual mechanism — the pleasure is social before it is literary.
If reading is genuinely not going to happen, build the vocabulary directly. It is second best, and it works. How to improve vocabulary sets out the method, and annotated student writing shows what close reading of a short piece looks like.

Reading and writing are the same muscle.

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