Research

Understanding how volunteers impact children’s reading

We’ve long identified a gap in how reading programmes are evaluated: children’s voices are often overlooked. To address this, we collaborated with Chapter One and independent consultant Dr Yaspia Salema, an expert in child-friendly research tools that empower diverse young readers to share their views. 

Together, we explored children’s reading attitudes and behaviours, developing a creative approach that puts them at the centre of the evaluation process. This in-depth study focused on four children across different schools, incorporating insights from their teachers, volunteers and parents. Explore the findings from the project here.

ImpactEd Report 2023/​24

An Impact evaluation of our One-to-one Reading Programme

Overview of the study:

Our impact team completed a one-year study in partnership with ImpactEd on the effectiveness of our One-to-one Reading Programme. 

This assessed the reading progress of 265 pupils across 18 partner schools. The study compared the performance of participating pupils, tracking changes in standardised reading scores.

The findings highlight improvements in reading ability, particularly among pupils from disadvantaged backgrounds and those with special educational needs (SEN). It also affirms the effectiveness of our Reading Programme and provides valuable insights to help shape its future development.

Key findings:

• Pupils in the Reading Programme showed an average increase of 5.8 points in their standardised reading scores, improving from 91.2 to 97.0 by the end of the 2023/​24 academic year. 
• Pupils eligible for pupil premium and pupils with SEN showed notably stronger improvements.

Read the highlights in our blog or download the full report below.