Julia Douetil, Reading Recovery trainer/coordinator at the European Centre for Reading Recovery at the Institute of Education, London, responded to reports on boys' literacy. She said:
"BBC research has highlighted the number of boys who are still poor readers at age 11. Its reports are asking why investments in education are not showing up in national assessments. The answer is that it is extremely difficult to turn around a child who has failed in literacy. It is much more effective to step in early, as soon as a child shows signs of difficulty, and prevent them failing.
"That is what Reading Recovery is doing. But the number of children able to receive Reading Recovery is only just reaching high enough levels to make an impact on national figures, and the children now receiving it at age five or six won't show up in the statistics for 11-year-olds until 2015.
"The government has expressed a commitment to raising standards in literacy and closing the attainment gap. Reading Recovery is a valuable tool in achieving those goals. The government anticipate that improvements in classroom teaching, including systematic synthetic phonics, can be expected to deliver higher standards for the majority of children. Current evidence suggests that this alone will not meet the needs of the bottom 5% of the mainstream cohort.
"Even the schools that are the most effective in teaching reading, as identified by Ofsted), have up to 15% of children who did not meet national targets at end of Key Stage 1 – indicating that excellent synthetic phonics programmes may in themselves be unable to address all literacy difficulties."
Ends
For more information please contact Diane Hofkins d.hofkins@ioe.ac.uk or Emily Brewer e.brewer@ioe.ac.uk at the IOE.
Editors' notes
Reading Recovery is a school-based literacy intervention specifically designed for the 5% lowest attaining children at the age of five or six.
Last year 1,656 schools in England were able to offer Reading Recovery to the five and six year old children who were struggling most with reading and writing. Boys are over-represented among the lowest attaining children by three to two, but just over 9,000 boys were given intensive one to one support with a highly trained reading recovery teacher.
These boys had made almost no progress in literacy learning in their first year at school and nine out of ten of them were still non-readers.
The intervention worked, with almost eight out of ten boys lifted to age appropriate levels of literacy within two terms. They made five times the normal rate of progress, from reading ages of four years ten months to reading ages of six years ten months and were operating at very similar levels to girls.
Children who were so low attaining in Y1 would normally be predicted to score below national curriculum level 2 at age 7, and to go on to score at below age levels at age 11. But after Reading Recovery the number of very low attaining boys failing to reach national curriculum levels at age 7 was reduced by two thirds, with 66% gaining level 2 or above.
In 2009, seven out of the 10 highest performing primary schools in National Assessments and seven out of the 10 most improved primary schools were Reading Recovery schools.
The Institute of Education is a college of the University of London that specialises in education and related areas of social science and professional practice. In the most recent Research Assessment Exercise two-thirds of the publications that the IOE submitted were judged to be internationally significant and over a third were judged to be "world leading". The Institute was recognised by Ofsted in 2010 for its "high quality" initial teacher training programmes that inspire its students "to want to be outstanding teachers". The IOE is a member of the 1994 group, which brings together 19 internationally renowned, research-intensive universities.
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