Catch up Literacy: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary
18 February 2015
This NFER report has been produced for the Education Endowment Foundation and its evaluation of Catch Up® Literacy - a structured one-to-one intervention for pupils aged 6 to 14 who are struggling to learn to read. The intervention adopts a combination of segmenting and blending phonemes, and memorising letter names of high-frequency sight words. It is targeted to the needs of individual learners, identified through a bank of assessments for learning, and involves two individual 15-minute sessions per week. A member of staff within each school manages Catch Up Literacy® while the intervention is usually delivered by trained teaching assistants. The TAs delivering Catch Up Literacy® were supplied with detailed session plans and received three half-day training sessions led by Catch Up®.
Key Findings
- The pupils that received Catch Up Literacy® made more progress than pupils that did not. However, this difference was not statistically significant so we cannot be confident that it was not due to chance.
- Catch Up Literacy® did have a statistically significant impact on pupils’ attitudes to school, self-assessed ability in reading, and their confidence in and enjoyment of writing.
- Teaching assistants reported a number of benefits for their own professional development. These include increases in confidence, knowledge of literacy support and overall job satisfaction.