SummaryAll 16‐year‐old children, in the two comprehensive schools of a town, whose reading was considered to be substantially below average by their teachers, were given a reading test to determine poor and very poor readers. The characteristics of the pupils in these groups were compared with those of a group of competent readers from the same schools. The characteristics that were examined were the personality dimensions of introversion‐extraversion and stability‐neuroticism, performance on Raven's Matrices (which was taken as an indication of wholist‐analytical reasoning style related to field‐dependence‐independence), sex and month of birth (which affected term of entry to school). The very poor readers group differed significantly from the good readers group in terms of the number of pupils who scored low on Raven's Matrices, were introverts, neurotic, and boys. Late month of birth in the school year was not significant. The results were interpreted as indicating that reading failure at 16+ is related to the incidence of two or more adverse characteristics, and an Index of Adverse Attributes