The reading crisis
2026 has been designated the National Year of Reading but it arrives at a time of crisis for literacy in the UK and North America. In 2025 the National Literacy Trust recorded the lowest levels of reading enjoyment it had ever measured: only about a third of 8-to-18-year-olds said they enjoyed reading in their free time, and fewer than one in five (18.7%) read something daily, roughly half the daily rate of two decades ago. Even among children aged 5 to 8, daily reading fell by 3.4 percentage points in a single year. The 2026 survey, published during the National Year of Reading itself, shows the first green shoots of recovery (enjoyment up to 36.1%, daily reading to 20.3%) but both remain far below even the levels of a decade ago, and the gaps by gender and by disadvantage are widening.
This doesn't just impact reading. the consequences of poor comprehension are wide: it depresses performance across the curriculum, and above all it erodes the capacity to think deeply about writing, what Maryanne Wolf calls deep reading: connecting background knowledge, making inferences, taking other perspectives, reading critically (Reader, Come Home, 2018). In English itself, top grades remain elusive: only around 15.0% of A Level English pupils achieve A*–A grades against 28.3% across all subjects (Nuffield Foundation / FFT Education Datalab), and English Language and Literature entries have declined by roughly 11.3% over seven years, outpacing broader A Level entry changes. The OECD's Survey of Adult Skills (2024) found adult literacy scores falling on average across most member countries over the past decade.
The problem is not equally spread across society, however, with declines in literacy exacerbating social and geographic inequalities. In the latest PISA reading assessments the UK scored above the OECD average, while also revealing significant disparities: 29% of Welsh students fell below the baseline literacy required to participate fully in society (PISA for Schools, OECD, 2026). Between September 2023 and 2026, the FFT's Reading Assessment Programme drew data from 230,000 pupils in 1,600 schools across England, producing around 1.06 million individual assessments. These showed that a third (33%) of White disadvantaged pupils have poor reading fluency in Year 6 compared to just a fifth (20%) for non-disadvantaged pupils (the FFT fluency measure being words correctly read aloud per minute, or WCPM, with 33% recording fewer than 90 WCPM) (FFT Education Datalab, 5 July 2026).
As part of the response to this 'crisis' in reading (The Guardian), or 'the end of reading' as The Atlantic put it this year, the Education Select Committee opened an inquiry into reading for pleasure. Publishing its report in July 2026, it warned that the decline is not only an educational concern but a challenge for the whole of society.
The need is clear, and not only for grades. Reading for pleasure is one of the strongest indicators of future life chances, more significant even than socio-economic background (OECD). It is one of the fundamental drivers of our ability to grow, as individuals and as members of wider, thriving communities. As the philosopher Martha Nussbaum has put it, stories are the birthplace of 'compassionate imagination'. Or as Marcel Proust argued, deep reading allows us 'to leave the wisdom of the author behind to discover our own'.
The probable cause
Although the reasons behind this crisis are many and their interaction complex, there is one abiding suspect: the ubiquity of the digital screen. The Select Committee's report identifies the rise of screen use as a major factor in reducing the time children spend reading for pleasure.
The same report is careful, though, and we should be too: the decline cannot be laid solely at the door of screens. That caution suits us. Our argument was never that screens are the enemy, it is just the behaviour screens currently train.
A 2024 meta-analysis of dozens of studies confirmed a robust 'screen inferiority effect': readers comprehend and retain less from screens than from the same text on paper. If we go back to Maryanne Wolf's description of 'deep reading' we can understand why: screens encourage skimming, and skimming stops us connecting background knowledge, making inferences, taking others' perspectives, analysing critically and so on. When we skim we simply don't leave time to think.
A 2025 review of reading research across two decades (Norman, Taylor and Rodd) sheds light on the process: a word becomes easy to read not because we see it again and again, but because we encounter it in many different contexts. The mind holds on to the words it judges most likely to be needed again. Every encounter with a word in a slightly new setting helps build our understanding of the word, its potential meanings, the way it might resonate with ideas and associations in different settings. So the more we read, the richer our encounter with language, the deeper our understanding of the text and the worlds the text opens up. Skimming corrodes this process, not just thinning each encounter, but reducing their number as well: the eye passes over the word without placing it in its multiple contexts (of syntax, discourse, pragmatics), and questions about its meaning, choice, and relation to the writer, and social, commercial, ideological or historical contexts remain unasked, let alone answered.
TikTok, YouTube Shorts and Instagram Reels might appear to be ushering in the post-literate society, shifting mainstream digital spaces from text to image, reading or scanning to quick-fire visual sensation. But despite their saturation with competing, split-screen visual stimulation, these forms remain heavily text-driven: young people 'multi-screening' run subtitles to keep tabs on films they are half-watching; clipped video shorts are given contextual or narrative framing by textual commentary; pop-ups, click-bait, adverts, straplines, all use words to drive and shape the responses of skimmers and scrollers.
Words are still everywhere, but they increasingly operate as ambient markers, or key-word triggers. Valid functions of language, for sure, but as linguists from Bühler and Jakobson, to Halliday and Leech, have pointed out, there is more to language than giving people information or telling them what to do. Fewer opportunities for focused narrative engagement, however, mean readers experience a much narrower range of linguistic function (squeezing out a rich range of functions from the emotionally expressive or poetically aesthetic, to the questioning heuristic, playful imaginative and, of course, the rapport-building 'phatic': see Leech's five functions of language, 1974, and Halliday's seven, 1975). Reading, essentially, begins to require less from the reader. A process that should be active becomes passive. The same Atlantic piece reports work from the Haskins Global Literacy Hub on what current screen-reading habits produce: a poor ability to maintain focus, a low tolerance for mental exertion, and scanning that yields only surface understanding.
Ban it, use it, or change the behaviour
People who care about these findings are therefore faced with a simple question: what can we do about it? There appear to be three ways forward. The first is to ban screens: remove the phones, and tablets, fence off the classroom, and hope the pull of the screen is not immediately rekindled once the pupils are out of the school gate. A nice idea but a forlorn hope. And besides, screens are and can be fun, useful, and we're not going to stop parents modelling their use at home either. So bans are not a realistic way forward. Restriction has its place but whatever we do in schools, the fact will remain: the skimming habit we want to tackle is trained for hours every evening, and no bell protects the exam hall from behaviours learned elsewhere.
The second approach is to use screens: put the curriculum on the screen as it stands (PDF worksheets, textbooks via apps) and further embed the behaviour the screen has been teaching. This is where most educational technology sits today, and it is one reason the screen inferiority effect keeps being replicated.
The third response is to respond to the research. If comprehension collapses not because of the screen itself, but because of the behaviour screens train, then that behaviour can be trained another way. A screen experience can be designed to ensure scanning, skipping and guessing don't work; that reading closely, identifying evidence, and thinking about it does. This is the idea that underpins Phatiks. We feel it's not just the right approach to the problem, but an opportunity for us, and screen readers everywhere, to have fun with, and think more deeply about, language, ultimately taking us back to the great texts, themselves, wherever and however we want to read them.
What we build
Phatiks builds reading and language games for secondary school English students (from Key Stages 3 to 5). Each game aims to train close, evidence-based reading, encourage a heightened sensitivity to words and language, and, of course, be fun to play. You cannot guess your way to a high score in a Phatiks game. Every engine is built so that scoring rewards precision, evidence and re-reading, so skimming is not going to work.
We understand the concerns about 'Gamification' but feel this usually means a simple scoring mechanism bolted onto a standard classroom worksheet. For us, the game is the discipline of reading. The mechanics are the pedagogy: revealing chunks to prevent skimming ahead; demanding evidence so pupils choose their words rather than sweep the page; asking for inference that only re-reading can give.
Our aim is to ensure every game can be tailored by teachers, so they can paste in the text their class is studying; draft questions, tags and tasks; check and edit their content before any pupil plays. The teacher remains the expert in the room, the human shaping the loop.
Two doors on one foundation
Every Phatiks game belongs to one of three layers, so the suite grows as a system.
The Toolkit is the foundation: the parts of language and the names for them. Texterminators drills grammatical terminology. MegaMorph teaches how English words are built and taken apart: free and bound morphemes, roots, prefixes, suffixes. Speed Reader trains fast, accurate recognition of what is actually on the page. INFER-RED teaches pupils to close in on an unfamiliar word's meaning by elimination.
The science under the foundation is specific. Recent work on reading acquisition (Taylor and colleagues, 2026) taught adults two invented writing systems: one where symbols mapped systematically onto sounds, one where they did not. The researchers found the brain learns by identifying the regularities of whatever system it encounters, choosing a different neural solution for each one. English is seen as (generally) systematic: its spellings map onto sounds with enough regularity to allow the system's rules to be learned. Where the sounds do not conform to those rules, the morphemes that structure the words still do. So, the adjective 'unaccountable' may feel awkward or unusual as a series of sounds, but it is perfectly logical or regular as a combination of meaningful parts. Fluent reading develops by learning and recognising such regularities, and it is that kind of recognition process Toolkit games train (see MegaMorph in particular).
From the foundation, two doors offer contrasting approaches to texts: reading into them, or reading across them.
Depth is about vertical reading: one text, read to the bottom. The key game here is Subtext, which reveals a text in short chunks, and asks the player to work through a series of challenges, such as 'heat-scanning' for expressive language, identifying specific evidence, and further analysis of that evidence for deeper inference. Scoring is based on range and precision of evidence.
Forensics is about horizontal reading: looking for links or contrasts between texts. The key game, Whodunnit?, asks players to identify the stylistic fingerprints, register, idiolect and authorship of one text, then find them in another, identifying the unknown author of the first. Players investigate a series of cases, assembling evidence in stages, before making their final accusation.
This is the kind of thing we hear from parents all the time: even when my child does read, they struggle to tell me what the story is about.
Wide reading builds recognition and fluency. It does not, on its own, build the precise, evidence-grounded reading a GCSE inference question demands. That has to be trained directly. The Toolkit builds breadth; Depth trains precision; Forensics extends those skills and makes them transferable.
Developed by a sceptical teacher
A year ago, Phatiks's founder stood in front of a school and delivered an hour's argument against screens in classrooms.
The speech began with Socrates, the first thinker to rail against reading technologies. For him, the problem was writing itself, a disruptive technology he feared would corrode real understanding, by moving the primary seat of knowledge from the head (in the form of memory) and onto the page (in the form of notes that relieve us of an obligation to remember). From Socrates, a line was then traced through the alarms that greeted print, television and the smartphone, thereby conceding that every generation's alarm sounds the same, and that the people raising it are usually men in their fifties. Surely, then, such objections were merely 'technophobia', the terrified cries of ageing people seeing the world moving on and away from them?
As with many similar cases, however, it is the differences that matter, and this sceptical teacher suggested that this time the alarm is justified: a House of Commons report finding that nearly a quarter of young people use their smartphones in a way consistent with behavioural addiction; the neuroscience of screens promoting sensation at the expense of thought; the meta-analysis behind the screen inferiority effect; and EdTech's habit of marking its own homework, equipping profit-hungry firms with glossy impact statistics whose source, on closer inspection, might be the company selling the technology.
A business proposition from the same author might look like a contradiction. For us, however, it's more like a starting point. That speech proposed a three-part test for any technology asking to be let into a classroom, based on principle, practice, and the whole point of education. It's these tests Phatiks aims to pass:
On principle, it matters what is being sold, and by whom. Phatiks is not a technology company looking for a way into education; it is a teacher's answer to a problem watched at close range for over twenty years. Nothing in a Phatiks game is designed to harvest attention: no infinite scroll, no engagement loops, no advertising, no pupil data flowing to anyone, and no runtime-AI. The scoring rewards the behaviours the attention economy trains against: patience, evidence and re-reading.
In practice, we hold ourselves to the standard we demand of others. We will not present our own classroom's enthusiasm as proof. It is there, and showed us we might be on to something, but know that the only evidence that counts will come from external schools and arm's-length validation such as the DfE EdTech Testbed.
And on the point of education: the speech argued that education is learning to think deeply, that deep thinking requires close reading, and that close reading requires practice and patience. This is the founding premise of Phatiks. The games are not a substitute for the book, they are training for it, deliberate practice in the disciplines of close reading, on the very device that currently trains the opposite, designed to send pupils back to the page stronger readers than they left it.
There is a precedent for this apparent contradiction. Socrates distrusted writing, while his student Plato used writing to preserve that distrust in his Socratic dialogues. The technology that threatened the older values was made to give it voice. And that is our ambition, to use the screen to get us back to the book.
So, we know how a sceptical English teacher or parent might respond to our games. We're aware of many objections they might raise (that screens erode attention, EdTech oversells, games trivialise) and agree with most, if not all, of them. In Phatiks, we hope they recognise a creative, interesting, and potentially effective response.
Who we aim to support
This is how we think our games can help three different groups of people.
Our games aim to give pupils a real for language, and greater sense of its possibilities and the way it works. They are designed to get young people thinking about words again, encouraging them look, instinctively, beneath the surface, and notice more subtle differences in style. Great for English exams, of course, even better for wider reading.
Subtext (Depth) · INFER-REDIdentifying specific skills that need to work is one thing, finding effective ways of teaching it, practising it, and assessing progress is another. Our games allow teachers to pick a skill and adapt it to their class or set text, engaging students in sometimes 'boring' subject areas (e.g. the dreaded 'grammar'), with arcade game scoring giving performance data that can be tracked across tasks and time.
Subtext · Whodunnit?Access to sites that justify screen time, engaging children while boosting core skills can be tricky. Phatiks aims to meet a real demand, whether our games are used in conjunction with school work, as part of a tutoring session, or in a family context, with parents challenging their own grasp of language and grammar or screen-reading habits.
Toolkit → Depth pathway2026 has been designated a National Year of Reading. The aim is to rekindle enjoyment in reading. The aim is not to have people, young or older, stuck to screens playing games. But we hope our responses to the reading research can help encourage a sharper sensitivity to language and a new sense of pleasure in words. And we hope that might lead a few more readers back to the actual books. And that's just the kind of thing the Education Select Committee has been asking for.
Whole suiteThe mission
Phatiks is trying to make close reading ‘trainable’. Each game focuses on a specific aspect of language comprehension, and is designed to be challenging, scorable and, we hope, good fun. We love books, and quiet, deep reading with the real, physical things. But we recognise that young people spend a lot of time on screens, even in schools. We also understand that whatever benefits those devices may bring in certain educational contexts, they are not good for sustained, close reading. They train students to scroll and skim. We want to make sure they can still slow down, follow extended linear narratives, reflect on what they are reading, and respond not just to the words on the page but the choices the writers of those words are making. And why. In short, we want to turn good skimmers into good readers, and good readers into experts. And we see that as a way of thinking more deeply and engaging more closely with the world and the people around us.
Screens teach skimming. Let's get people reading again.
Sources. National Literacy Trust, Annual Literacy Survey 2025 and 2026 · Education Select Committee, Reading for Pleasure (report, 17 July 2026) · Paul Charman and Dave Thomson, 'The reading fluency of White working class pupils', FFT Education Datalab (5 July 2026) · The Guardian, 'How to solve the literacy crisis in schools' (letters, 8 July 2026, responding to the FFT analysis) · Rose Horowitch, 'The End of Reading Is Here', The Atlantic (August 2026) House of Commons Education Committee, Screen Time: Impacts on Education and Wellbeing (2024) · Delgado et al. (2018) and subsequent meta-analytic work on the screen inferiority effect · Maryanne Wolf, Reader, Come Home: The Reading Brain in a Digital World (2018) · On the functions of language: Karl Bühler, Sprachtheorie (1934; trans. Theory of Language, 1990) · Roman Jakobson, 'Linguistics and Poetics', in T. A. Sebeok (ed.), Style in Language (1960) · M. A. K. Halliday, Learning How to Mean: Explorations in the Development of Language (1975) · Geoffrey Leech, Semantics (1974), on the five functions of language · Norman, R., Taylor, J. S. H., & Rodd, J. M. (2025), 'The effects of contextual diversity on lexical processing: a scoping review', Psychonomic Bulletin & Review, 32, 2763–2806 · Taylor, J. S. H., Jowett, A., Auer, T., Hsieh, C.-Y., Lingnau, A., & Rastle, K. (2026), 'The nature of a writing system shapes the cognitive and neural mechanisms for reading acquisition', Neurobiology of Language, 7 · OECD, Survey of Adult Skills (2024); PISA for Schools (2026) · Nuffield Foundation / FFT Education Datalab, A Level English entry and grade analysis. See also our links & further reading.