A sign that Sherds saw in a bookshop recently claimed that ‘reading is cheaper than therapy’, but universities in the UK are reporting the opposite: that students suffer stress when asked to read. Back in the last century, weekly essays were the norm, and this usually involved extensive reading, but universities are now having to offer ‘reading resilience’ courses to teach students how to concentrate long enough to read a book.
According to the academics quoted in a recent article in The Times, phones are partly to blame, but so is the way that English is taught. Robert Eaglestone, Professor of Contemporary Literature and Thought at Royal Holloway University, says that ‘terrible English GCSEs’ deter teenagers: ‘the literature is unbelievably boring and taught in a repetitive way to pass the exam’, he says. Academics also report that students in all subjects are less willing to tackle ‘older or more difficult books’ and that a gap has developed between degree studies and relatively undemanding A-levels that involve studying extracts rather than whole works.
One consequence is that the number of pupils taking English A-levels has plummeted from being the most popular subject a decade ago to being outside the top ten today. English Literature or Language A-levels were taken by 58,000 entrants in 2025, down from nearly 90,000 in 2015, while the numbers taking English degrees have fallen from 42,285 in 2019-2020 to 33,515 in 2023-2024.
Roman towns and cities: Cirencester – Excavating the CA archive