Children's Reading: The Language Recession: Why Children Are Arriving at School Unable to Speak
- David Salariya
- 15 hours ago
- 4 min read
Children reading
Before children’s books,
there were children’s stories.
Before learning to read,
we learned to listen.
And somewhere in that listening -
the book was born.
Children's Reading
Before a child can read, they must speak. Before they can speak, they must listen. And before they can listen, someone has to be there - talking, singing, noticing, responding. Strip away that chain and the whole enterprise collapses. We are now living with the consequences.
New research from the Local Government Association confirms what those engaged in work in the early-years have been saying for years: a disproportionate rise in children arriving at nursery and reception with little or no language.
Not late talkers. Not shy children. Children with no speech at all, children unable to understand turn-taking or simple instructions, children unable to play socially because the foundations of communication simply never formed.
This is not a blip. It is not a Covid artefact. It is a long-term structural shift in the way very young children are being raised - and it’s creating what amounts to a Language Recession across the country.
The study in 2008 showed that forward facing buggies were detrimental to speech development - that is now seventeen years ago.
Key findings of both research projects include:
62% of all children observed were travelling in away-facing buggies, with the rate even higher, at 86%, between the ages of 1 and 2 years
Parents using face-to-face buggies were twice as likely to be talking to their baby (25 per cent compared to 11 per cent)
Less than a quarter of parents observed were speaking to their child (22 per cent)
Mothers and infants, who had a chance in the experimental study to travel in both types of buggies, also laughed more frequently with face-to-face buggies. Only one baby in the group of 20 studied laughed during the away-facing journey, while half laughed during the face-to-face journey
Babies’ average heart rates fell slightly when placed in a toward-facing buggy, and babies were also twice as likely to fall asleep in this orientation, both of which could taken as possible indicators of reduced stress levels
Teachers as First Responders
Reception teachers have become the nation’s emergency speech therapists. A primary school cited in the report went from zero EHCPs in early years to eight across nursery and reception. Another school saw a fourfold increase in SEND. Speech and language referrals are up nearly 50% in some regions. Providers are reducing hours for children they cannot safely support; a quarter have had to turn children away.
This is the point where “early intervention” becomes a euphemism for “firefighting.”
Why It’s Happening
The decline in early language predates the pandemic by years. Covid acted as an accelerant, not a cause. The underlying forces are depressingly familiar:
Shrinking adult timeExhausted parents juggling multiple jobs. Two-income households stretched thin. Zero-hour contracts. Family stress leaves less time for talk.
Screens replacing speechWe have created a generation of toddlers who can swipe before they can speak. Technology isn’t evil - but it cannot substitute for human conversation.
Erosion of community infrastructureSure Start was never replaced. Health visitor numbers fell. Informal support networks frayed.
Rising povertyLanguage thrives in environments of stability. It withers in households fighting for survival.
Better identification of neurodivergencePositive in itself, but the system cannot keep up with the diagnostic demand.
All of this means more children simply aren’t receiving the sustained back-and-forth conversation that builds the neurological architecture for speech.
Why This Matters for Reading (and for Us)
Children who cannot speak cannot read. Children who cannot communicate cannot comprehend.Children who cannot decode social interaction cannot access classroom learning.
The reading crisis - which we all discuss, analyse, debate - begins here, in the silent nurseries and the overwhelmed homes where spoken language has quietly leaked away.
This is the part we rarely say out loud: reading for pleasure has no chance in a society where children are not hearing enough words to build the scaffolding of understanding.
Booksellers experience the effects of this upstream crisis further down the line. Libraries notice it when five-year-olds struggle to sit through a story. Publishers observe it when sentences must be shortened, formats simplified, and the number of illustrations increased-not because children are less intelligent, but because their early language exposure has diminished.
The Government’s Answer?
The DfE promises that by 2028, 75% of five-year-olds will be “school-ready.”By what mechanism? There was no detail. No restoration of health visiting. No frank acknowledgement that language is not created in institutions but in relationships.
The rhetoric is optimistic. The reality is uncosted.
What Needs to Happen
If we want children to read - and all the publishing campaigns, literacy initiatives, and prize shortlists in the world depend on this - then we need to rebuild the conditions that allow reading to exist:
Parents and carers need time with their children, not just pressure.
Nurseries need trained, paid, respected staff.
Screens need boundaries, not blame.
Libraries and toddler groups must be restored, not merely mourned.
Early-years SEND support must be funded at the level of reality, not at the level of aspiration.
And underpinning all of it: we must bring back talk. Talking is the seedbed of literacy. Storytime is not a luxury; it is the infrastructure of human development.
What the Books World Can Do
This is not a crisis we can solve, but we can refuse to look away. Publishers, booksellers, librarians, illustrators, and writers know something essential: children’s language grows when adults share stories with them.
If Britain is losing its words, we are among the people who can give them back.
We are not dealing with a generation that doesn’t want to read.We are dealing with a generation that needs rebuilding at the root - in speech, in play, in story, and in human presence.
Until policymakers accept this, the Language Recession will deepen, and the reading crisis will continue to be misdiagnosed as a failure of schools rather than a failure of the society around them.
But the solution begins in the simplest place:
A book, a lap, a voice, a child - and time.