Fewer Australian children read for pleasure, prompting calls for national strategy

Across Australia, children dressed as characters from Where’s Wally and Harry Potter for Book Week. But literacy and library organisations say too many are celebrating the costumes without reading the books behind them.

A new Statement on School Libraries and Reading for Pleasure, released during Book Week, calls for school libraries to become mandatory and receive proper funding and staffing. The statement came from the Australian Library and Information Association, the Australian Coalition for School Libraries and literacy charity Australia Reads.

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We want more support and investment in reading as an infrastructure.

Australia Reads chief executive Anna Burkey said the campaign needed to move beyond the volunteer effort that makes Book Week possible. “We want more support and investment in reading as an infrastructure,” she said. “We need a national plan.”

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We need a national plan.

Burkey said access to books had become a postcode lottery, particularly for children in poorer areas. “I was at a private school yesterday and it had five librarians but you go five miles down the road and there's a school that has no library or librarians,” she said.

A 2025 University of South Australia study found that the proportion of children who never read for fun rose from 10.8% in 2019 to 52.5% in 2022. Over the same period, daily social media use increased from 26% to 85.4%. NAPLAN reading results also fell, with the share of Year 5 students at a strong or exceeding level dropping from 74.5% in 2023 to 71% in 2026.

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It becomes a postcode lottery.

Burkey said adults were reading less too, with 30% of Australians not picking up a book in the previous year. Still, she pointed to reasons for optimism: “The other good news story is that half of Australians want to read more often.”

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The other good news story is that half of Australians want to read more often.