Catch Up Literacy

Intervention description

Catch Up Literacy is a structured one-to-one reading intervention for struggling readers between the ages of 6 and 14. Sessions are based around an appropriately levelled text and involve prepared reading, discussion of the text and linked writing activities. The intervention matches books to pupils according to their reading ability, which pupils then read to a teaching assistant, so is intended to also support the development of their comprehension skills.

The intervention also includes a bank of assessments which can be used to monitor progress, set targets and identify the needs of individual pupils.

Staffing requirements

15-minute sessions delivered twice weekly by teachers, teaching assistants or mentors. A coordinator for each school.

Professional development/training

A complete training and support package for each intervention, centred on 3 half-day training sessions for the staff who will deliver the intervention. A minimum of 2 staff are trained in addition to the coordinator, to increase flexibility.

Technology

The intervention is book based. The progress tracking tools are purpose-designed Excel templates.

Evidence Summary

The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) ran a project in 2013/2014 investigating the effectiveness of Catch Up Literacy, which found that it had a positive impact on reading for pupils making the transition from primary to secondary school, with an effect size of +0.12 for secondary reading.

The EEF ran a second evaluation at a larger scale with 156 schools which found a much smaller impact on reading for primary school pupils. The less promising result may be due to the changes introduced to the intervention after the first evaluation. This study evaluated a revised model of the intervention, and was aimed at pupils in Years 4 and 5, rather than pupils moving from primary to secondary school. The intervention was not always delivered as intended. Some schools struggled to resource two one-to-one sessions per week, while in other schools Teaching Assistants adapted how they delivered individual sessions. This study found an effect size of +0.01 for primary reading.

Key research

The Education Endowment Foundation ran an evaluation investigating the effectiveness of Catch Up Literacy for pupils making the transition from primary to secondary school.

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/catch-up-literacy

The Education Endowment Foundation ran a second evaluation of Catch Up Literacy, this larger scale study looked at the impact on pupils in Years 4 and 5.

https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/projects-and-evaluation/projects/catch-up-literacy