Funding for new project to help struggling readers in primary schools

School of Education academics Paula Clarke and Shirley-Anne Paul have been awarded funding from the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).

The funding is for a new project REACH Primary (REAding for CompreHension), following their earlier work with secondary schools. REACH Primary is an intervention programme for struggling readers delivered by trained Teaching Assistants to individual pupils over a period of 20 weeks.

The trial will run with Year 3 pupils (seven and eight year olds) in 80 primary schools and is being independently evaluated by researchers at Sheffield Hallam University.

The programme comes out of research into two interventions, one designed to improve word recognition and decoding (known as Reading Intervention) and one focused on language comprehension (known as the README OL programme).

For further information please contact p.j.clarke@leeds.ac.uk