| Abstract: | The Catch Up Programme is a literacy intervention designed for children who are behind with reading at the start of Year 3 (7 to 8 year‐olds). This paper describes pilot research that informed the project in its early stages of development, and the findings should therefore be treated with caution. The reading progress of a sample of 74 Catch Up pupils from 15 schools in three local education authorities was measured. This showed a considerable increase in pupils’ reading ages across a 10 week period. A smaller experimental study was also carried out in nine Oxfordshire schools (48 pupils) to compare a Catch Up sub‐sample with a Matched Time group and a Control group. Findings showed that the Catch Up pupils made considerably more progress during the same period than both the other groups. |
