Year 7 Transition Project

AIMS To provide support in literacy and study skills for year 7 pupils. The Helen Arkell Centre are providing twice weekly individual support to 12 year 7 pupils in two mainstream secondary schools, with an additional school joining shortly. To provide empirical and anecdotal evidence of the improvements that can be made in the literacy skills of year 7 pupils if they are provided with well targeted support by specialist teachers during their first year of secondary school.

METHOD Pilot study involving 1 taught group of 6 pupils. 3 ‘taught’ groups receiving twice weekly individual support. 3 control groups matched for age, sex and general ability. Initial assessment followed by at least 2 terms of teaching and reassessment. Long term follow up planned for a year after last teaching.

ASSESSMENT Literacy assessments for control and taught groups. Cognitive skills assessment for taught group. Pupil self-esteem questionnaire School tutor questionnaire with ratings on 4 point scale including listening skills, language skills, organisation, reading, writing and memory skills. Family questionnaire with ratings on a 4 point scale including organisation, academic self-esteem, tiredness, concentration

TEACHING PRINCIPLES 1 Teaching should aim to improve the pupil’s ability to access the curriculum across a range of subjects but particularly those with a heavy literacy component, e.g. history, geography, science. Consolidation activities should be based on the current curriculum where possible. Teaching should aim to improve pupil’s ability to be independent learners by encouraging them to recognise and develop a range of strategies appropriate for different situations. Teaching should aim to help develop skills needed in year 7 such as developing research and study skills, e.g. reading for meaning, summarizing, answering questions from a text, interpreting information and putting it into their own words, reading and following instructions, using dictionaries.

TEACHING PRINCIPLES 2 Teaching should provide the pupil’s with opportunities for success and encourage them to take risks in order to make progress with their learning and develop their self-confidence. Where necessary teaching should address language and listening skills such as vocabulary development, identification and communication of main ideas, listening for detail, oral story telling. Areas of teaching on current IEPs include developing reading accuracy including phonic and meaning based strategies. Developing reading comprehension skills and the use of interactive reading strategies. Developing single word spelling strategies. Developing writing skills including technical writing skills, sentence and paragraph structure, planning skills and vocabulary use.

School’s Single Word Reading Assessment – Pilot Study Year 7 – SeptemberYear 7 – March * * 80 % attendance

Impact on Achievement – Pilot Study Following 2 terms of intervention the pupil’s attainment was reassessed. Every pupil achieved increases in their standard scores across a range of measures including single word reading, prose reading accuracy, reading comprehension and spelling. All pupils displayed increases in standard scores for word reading with some pupils showing a gain of 10 points. In 50% of cases the standard scores moved from the below average range to the average range.

Impact (cont’d) Four of the six pupils increased standard scores for spelling, some by as much as 15 points. Three pupils increased their reading comprehension from either the below average to average band, or the average to above average band. All the pupils spoke very positively about the teaching and felt their performance in class had improved as a result. All of them were able to describe strategies that they now used for attacking difficult words when reading and spelling and these strategies were also evident in the assessment.

The imponderables other connections with the schools -the ripple effect levels of awareness language versus literacy