Pupils make no progress following scaled-up literacy scheme

A literacy scheme which aims to help struggling pupils has failed to produce the same positive results as in a smaller trial.

Switch-on, delivered by Nottinghamshire County Council, trained teaching assistants to deliver an intensive one-to-one literacy intervention for pupils struggling to read.

The 10-week programme was made up of short reading sessions that aimed to support the pupils to become more confident and independent in their reading ability.

A trial of the scheme involving 19 schools, which was funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), showed that it delivered an average of 3 months of additional progress for pupils struggling to read at the transition between primary and secondary school.

Following this, the EEF has funded a bigger trial to find out if the positive results could be repeated at a larger scale in 185 schools across the country.

However, The independent evaluators from National Centre for Social Research found that the children who received the Switch-on intervention in this larger trial made no more progress than the children in the ‘business as usual’ control group.

According to the EEF, the difference in results between the trials could be because the training model was altered so the programme could be run in a large number of schools nationally.

The EEF will now discuss with the Switch-on team options for developing and testing an alternative model for scaling the intervention that can be delivered in many schools, but with the same positive effects of the smaller trial.