What Works for Children with Literacy Difficulties? - Digital ...

1.2 The need
What proportion of children experience literacy difficulties? An estimate (for England only,
since the DfES’s remit is only for England) can be based on the results of National
Curriculum assessments. Table 1 gives the percentages of children not yet achieving level 2
in reading at the end of Key Stage 1 (age 7), or not yet achieving level 3 in English at Key
Stage 2 (age 11), in 1998-2002.
Table 1: Percentage of children in England achieving below level 2 in Reading in
Key Stage 1 National Curriculum tests, or below level 3 in English at Key
Stage 2, 1998-2002 *
Key Stage 1 Key Stage 2
Year Percentage Percentage
1998 19% 7%
1999 17% 7%
2000 16% 6%
2001 16% 7%
2002 15% (provisional) 7% (provisional)
* excluding absent pupils
This shows that significant numbers of children experience literacy difficulties and are likely
to have difficulty in coping with the steadily increasing demands of the curriculum in Key
Stage 3 (and beyond).
So what can be done for these children? We have identified 25 studies which are useful in
attempting to answer this question.
1.3 The schemes covered
The titles of the 25 studies we have analysed, and the shorter names by which they are mainly
referred to in this report, are as shown in Table 2. Several of the studies contained evaluations
of more than one scheme, so in order to show the full coverage of the report, relevant studies
are shown with their ‘alternative interventions’ (that is, the other approaches with which the
main ones were compared) listed in italics below their full title. These alternative
interventions bring the total of approaches evaluated up to nearly 40. In addition, many of the
studies contained ‘no intervention’ (‘ordinary classroom teaching’) control groups, and these
are also analysed here: studies with a well-defined no-intervention control group are marked
with an asterisk.
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