Research School Network: Improving Literacy in Key Stage One Guidance Report

The EEF guidance reports try to take what we know about various aspects of teaching and summarise the evidence in a series of recommendations. One of the first reports to be published was Improving Literacy in Key Stage One. This report formed the foundation of our first Research Roadshow workshop at Copthorne Primary School earlier this year. We think it’s a great place to start, because every school, in every setting, wants to improve literacy. Whilst not offering any quick fixes, the recommendations in the report offer starting points for all literacy questions.

How should teachers use the report?

There are eight recommendations in the report:

1. Develop pupils’ speaking and listening skills and wider understanding of language
2. Use a balanced and engaging approach to developing reading, which integrates both decoding and comprehension skills
3. Effectively implement a systematic phonics programme
4. Teach pupils to use strategies for developing and monitoring their reading comprehension
5. Teach pupils to use strategies for planning and monitoring their writing
6. Promote fluent written transcription skills by encouraging extensive and effective practice and explicitly teaching spelling
7. Use high-quality information about pupils’ current capabilities to select the best next steps for teaching
8. Use high-quality structured interventions to help pupils who are struggling with their literacy

You can print out a poster with each of these recommendations, together with some simple key steps. For example, for Recommendation 8, the following guidance is given to support it:

Schools should focus on core classroom teaching strategies, which improve literacy for the whole class. However, even when excellent classroom teaching is occurring, it is likely that a small number of children will also require more focused literacy instruction to make expected progress.

The first step should be to use accurate diagnosis of capabilities and difficulties to match pupils to appropriate interventions.

There is a strong and consistent body of evidence demonstrating the benefit of one-to-one or small-group tutoring using structured interventions for children who are struggling with literacy.

This could be useful to display in a prominent position in your school, or as a simple starting point when deciding on an intervention. The recommendations will all make sense to those involved in literacy. However, the evidence strength of each recommendation provides a guide for where we can be most sure that an intervention might work. The evidence strength for implementing a systematic phonics programme is ​‘very extensive’ whereas there is ​‘limited’ evidence for Recommendation 6: Promote fluent written transcription skills by encouraging extensive and effective practice and explicitly teaching spelling.

Delving deeper…

For the literacy guidance reports to have a greater impact, it is important to look beyond the recommendations and explore the detail. In the report, each recommendation gets a page to explore some further strategies. For example, Recommendation 5 – Teach pupils to use strategies for planning and monitoring their writing – has guidance on the types of strategies pupils should be taught to use and Recommendation 6 explains how we might explicitly teach spelling:

In the absence of better evidence regarding the teaching of spelling, teachers should be aware of the other strategies that good spellers appear to use, and consider teaching these strategies directly. These include:

• a phonic approach — sounding out the word, and spelling it the way it sounds;
• analogy — spelling it like other known words (for example ​‘call’ and ​‘fall’);
• the identification of the ​‘tricky’ parts of words so that these can be learned (such as ​‘separate’ and ​‘miniature’) — many of the most common words in English are ​‘tricky’ (now known as ​‘common exception words’ in the National Curriculum); and
• a visual approach — writing the word in two or three different ways and deciding which looks right.

…and deeper

This report is not new research, but takes existing evidence and summarises it. Each recommendation is heavily referenced and all of the sources are listed at the end of the report. These then offer further reading for teachers who may wish to become even more informed. If we look at Recommendation 2 – Use a balanced and engaging approach to developing reading which integrates both decoding and comprehension skills – we can see a reference to Shanahan et al (2010) Improving reading comprehension in kindergarten through 3^rd grade: A practice guide. This leads us to a detailed report from The Institute of Education Sciences (IES). The practice guide offers further practical suggestions to address reading comprehension. Then, from this one guide, a treasure trove of similar guides to other aspects of literacy and education is revealed.

There are further ways to ​‘delve deeper’ by reading specific papers that influence the report and these guides, or by looking at the EEF toolkit’s Literacy strand to see which programmes might be effective to use.