CUREE has worked with Achievement for All (AfA3As) since its early days as an independent charity. We are very pleased to be working with them, supported by the Education Endowment Fund (EEF) in trialling enhancements to the AFA programme using evidence based interventions known as Response to Intervention.
Achievement for All is a successful school improvement programme focussed on raising the aspirations, access and achievements of the 20% of vulnerable, special educational needs and disabled learners. After a successful national pilot in over 450 schools, the programme has now been adopted by hundreds of other primary and secondary schools. You can find out more about the programme here.
During the Summer of 2013 CUREE and AfA3As ran a large scale randomised control trial (RCT) in 60 schools testing AfA's impact at primary/secondary transfer and, specifically, testing an enhancement to the AfA approach known as Response to Intervention (RTI). RTI is compatible with AfA's core approach but adds to it some specific evidence-based approaches to improving reading and writing attainment and a multi-level intervention strategy.
The results of the June/July trial have been evaluated by the EEF appointed external evaluator (Professor Stephen Gorard), to see the report click here. Before this, our first informal analysis of the test results show promising results - particularly for an intervention which lasted less than half a term. We also learned a lot about running a control trial - experience which is proving invaluable in our work in designing the Closing the Gap: Test and Learn major RCT programme for the National College for Teaching and Leadership
Although the initial randomised control trial was 'spoilt' because of technical problems with the control group tests in the last three days of term, we carried on with the work even though it wasn't formally part of the trial. This year, the activities look place over a term and all the tests were conducted successfully. The analysis of these results has show that the 'gain' (the difference between the test scores before and after the intervention) gave an effect size of 0.73. This suggests that three months of RTI could have an impact equivalent to 9 months progress in one year for the most vulnerable pupils. Of course, pupils progress anyway so we also compared the attainment of the RtI groups with similar groups of Year 6's last year following their normal programmes, not RTI. The RTI pupils this year achieved an effect size of 0.51 greater than that of the non-RTI pupils. This suggests that one term of RTI could be having an impact equivalent to 6 months' additional progress.
More about the trial can be found in our July ENewsletter, or you can contact us if you want to know more.