Intervention for Dyslexia - The British Dyslexia Association

5.3.2 Every Child a Reader (ECaR)
In 2005 the Reading Recovery initiative in England was revived by the provision of £10
million in funding committed jointly by government and sponsors, in a project called
Every Child a Reader (ECaR). This began in a small number of local authorities and with
a small number of teachers who had received the extra training to become ECaR
teachers over and above being Reading Recovery teachers; it also started with a small
subset of all children receiving Reading Recovery in England. As will be seen shortly,
ECaR has expanded rapidly, but at the time of writing in 2009 has not yet been
extended to cover all Reading Recovery provision in England, and does not apply in the
rest of the UK (or in the Republic of Ireland, which is included in annual reports from
IoE). In what follows, where necessary distinctions will be drawn between ECaR and
Reading Recovery more generally.
At the end of the first year of the project (2005–06) data for all the children who had
completed ECaR programmes during the year (N=373) showed that 77% had been
successfully discontinued, and 23% had been referred for further support (ECaR, 2006).
At the beginning of the year, the full group of children had an average reading age of 4
years 10 months on the BAS Word Reading Test, and at the end of the intervention this
had gone up to an average reading age of 6 years 7 months, an average gain of 21
months. For 286 of these children the average interval between the pre- and post-tests
was, apparently, about 4½ months, but for the 87 who were in the ECaR in London
study (see Section 5.4.2) it was 10 months. Averaging across the two groups, this
equates to a ratio gain of 3.6. The children had received an average of 38.5 hours of
one-to-one tuition during the year (ECaR, 2006).
The evaluation of the second year of the project (2006–07) reported on ECaR teaching
delivered to 1,838 children, of whom 1,081 had completed their programmes by the end
of the school year and the remainder were due to complete during 2007–08 (ECaR,
2007). Data were based on delivery by 245 teachers, who each taught an average of
between seven and eight children during the year. The average amount of tuition was
42 hours per child, slightly higher than in 2005-06. As in the 2005-06 samples,
participating schools had high proportions of low-achieving children, socio-economic
disadvantage, and EAL children. The ECaR children had very low levels of literacy on
entry to the programme, as assessed by the Observation Survey. At the beginning of
their programmes, the Reading Recovery children who completed them during the year
(N=1,081) had an average reading age of 4 years 10 months on the BAS Word Reading
Test. The 245 children who were referred made an average gain of 9 months of reading
age (ECaR, 2007, p.13), whereas the 836 who were discontinued (ECaR, 2007, Figure 1,
p.13) appear to have made an average gain of 21 months of reading age (the sample
size given in ECaR, 2007, Table 2, p.14 appears to be erroneous). If these figures are
correct, the average gain across the full sample was 18.3 months, giving an overall ratio
gain of 4.0.
Douëtil (2006) reported on 3,566 children who had been on Reading Recovery
programmes in 2005–06 across Britain and Ireland (including those on ECaR mentioned
above): the ratio gain in reading for this group was 4.2; 3,042 (85%) had been
successfully discontinued (ibid., Table 3.1, p. 12). Analysing data on 1,440 and 516
children who could be traced and were re-tested three and six months respectively after
the end of their programmes, Brooks (2007, p.215) showed that those children made,
on average, exactly standard progress. When followed up at Key Stage 1 National
Curriculum assessments, 38% of the sample achieved target levels (level 2b or above).
However, it could be argued that, since the children on these programmes had made
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