£4m for expansion of new literary projects

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has announced it will provide almost £4 million in funding to expand six education projects aimed at boosting pupils’ attainments.

The EEF will recruit 920 primary schools, over 48,000 pupils, to trial the projects on a larger scale. The projects include: Grammar for Writing; Accelerated Reader; Catch-Up Literacy; Thinking, Doing, Talking Science; Affordable Primary Tuition; and Read Write Inc. Phonics and Fresh Start.

Grammar for Writing is delivered by the University of Exeter, which will help pupils to understand how linguistic structures convey meaning, making grammatical rules less abstract. It was previously found to result in the whole class improving by the equivalent of two months.

Accelerated Reader is a software which allows schools to screen pupils quickly, in order to determine their reading level, and then to match them with popular books at the relevant level. It also highlights where interventions are needed, and what kinds of interventions might work best in each situation. Smaller trials resulted in an improvement in pupils’ reading ages of between three and five months.

In addition, Catch-Up Literacy, which will be led by teaching assistants, is a one-to-one literacy intervention for pupils between the ages of six and 14. The programme teaches pupils a range of reading strategies, including phonics. In the smaller trial, it was found to result in two months’ progress among pupils.

Thinking, Doing, Talking Science, delivered in conjunction with Oxford Brookes University, is a programme aims to make science lessons in primaries more practical and creative. It trains teachers to encourage pupils to use higher-order thinking skills and was previously found to result in between three and five months’ additional progress among pupils.

Affordable Primary Tuition recruits university students and recent graduates, and trains them to offer one-on-one and small-group tuition in schools serving large numbers of disadvantaged pupils.

Read Write Inc. Phonics and Fresh Start will test the impact of two synthetic-phonics literacy programmes. Read Write Inc is intended for early infants readers and also children in Years 3 and 4 who are still having difficulty with speed and accuracy.

Sir Kevan Collins, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation, said: “Evidence is a teachers’ greatest ally when it comes to deciding between different programmes or interventions. The most useful thing it can tell them is, if they replicate the intervention, will they get the same results in their classroom.

“We know that the six programmes we’ve announced new funding for today can all improve results for primary school pupils. But only by evaluating them on a larger scale will we be able to find out if they can be implemented successfully in many different schools.”