If your child is struggling to read, there is almost always a specific, fixable reason. Here is how to find it.
Watching your child struggle to read is one of the most stressful experiences a parent can face — particularly when classmates seem to be coping, or when your child's school insists everything is "fine." This guide explains the most common underlying causes of reading difficulty, how to identify them, and what actually helps.
By far the most common reason children struggle to read is a gap or weakness in foundational phonics. Phonics is the system that connects letters to sounds — without it, children cannot decode unfamiliar words and must rely on guessing or memorisation, which eventually fails them.
Signs of a missing phonics foundation:
What helps: Structured, systematic phonics instruction from a trained teacher. This is not the same as general English tuition — it specifically targets the sound-letter system that underpins all reading.
Phonemic awareness is the ability to hear, identify, and manipulate sounds in spoken words — before any reading or writing is involved. Children with weak phonemic awareness struggle to rhyme, to identify the first sound in a word, or to blend sounds they hear orally.
This is a prerequisite for phonics. Without phonemic awareness, phonics instruction is harder to absorb. Signs include: difficulty with rhyming games, inability to clap syllables in words, or struggling to say a word without its first sound.
What helps: Phonemic awareness activities — rhyming games, sound sorting, oral blending and segmenting — as a foundation before or alongside phonics instruction.
Reading is a skill. Like any skill, it requires regular, consistent practice to develop. Many children struggle simply because they do not read enough — at school, at home, or both.
Three sessions of phonics per week plus 5–10 minutes of daily reading practice at home produces dramatically better results than one class per week with no home practice.
What helps: Building a daily reading routine — even 10 minutes of guided reading before bed makes a significant cumulative difference over a term.
Once a child has struggled with reading for some time, they often develop anxiety around it. They avoid reading aloud, make excuses to skip reading activities, or shut down when asked to read. This anxiety then makes the learning harder — a difficult cycle to break.
This is not laziness or attitude. It is a completely understandable response to repeated failure.
What helps: Small batch classes where mistakes are safe, immediate positive reinforcement, and careful choice of reading material at the right level — easy enough to succeed, challenging enough to grow.
Less commonly, reading difficulties are linked to vision or hearing issues that have not been identified. If a child cannot see the board clearly or cannot hear the teacher accurately, phonics instruction simply does not land.
What helps: An eye test and a basic hearing check — straightforward steps that are often overlooked. If these check out fine, the cause is almost certainly foundational and phonics instruction will help.
If your child has been receiving phonics support for 3–6 months with a qualified teacher and is still making very slow progress, it may be worth consulting a specialist literacy assessor. Conditions like dyslexia do not prevent children from learning to read — they require a modified phonics approach, not an alternative to it.
If you are concerned about your child's reading, book a free demo assessment at ExcelKidsHub. We will identify exactly where the gap is and what targeted instruction your child needs.
Related reading: 5 Signs Your Child Needs Phonics Support | Best Age to Start Phonics