Primary schools across England with Year 6 cohorts in Autumn 2024 were invited to take part in the EEF’s trial of our KS2 Reading Fluency Project. We successfully recruited 180 schools and the trial is well underway.
This trial of the project, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) through the Department for Education’s Accelerator Fund, offers an exciting opportunity for us and our schools to contribute to the national research exploring whether targeted fluency instruction improves reading comprehension.
Why teach reading fluency?
Reading comprehension is our ultimate goal in the teaching of fluency. Understanding texts, reacting to them and being able to read between the lines is essential if we want children to become keen, volitional readers. Reading comprehension is also vitally important for achievement across the whole curriculum, as much of what children learn throughout the day is learned through reading in one way or another.
Reading fluency can be defined as reading with accuracy (correctly reading the words), automaticity (reading words effortlessly, on sight) and prosody (reading with expression and intonation). Why does dysfluency lead to a lack of comprehension then? It is thought that when all the brain’s cognitive space is being used to decode the words on the page, then there is insufficient space left for meaningful understanding to take place. Therefore, in order to free-up that capacity for understanding, fluency needs to be explicitly taught and frequently applied.
What is the KS2 Reading Fluency Project?
The KS2 Reading Fluency Project is an evidence-based intervention designed to teach automaticity and prosody to underachieving readers in upper KS2 in order to improve reading comprehension achievement in a short space of time. The project focuses on the reading of challenging, real, age-appropriate texts, with a particular emphasis on prosody instruction – the rhythm and intonation of speech. The intervention is delivered by the class teacher and targets small groups of 6-8 pupils. Over 2,200 students have already participated since the project began in 2017, and our analysis suggests that this explicit teaching of oral fluency can significantly boost reading comprehension. Participating teachers are taught to artfully employ, through a range of activities, key strategies known to develop reading fluency.
Why is this trial important?
The EEF has identified reading fluency as a high-impact strategy in improving literacy outcomes, as highlighted in their KS2 Literacy Guidance Report. The Department for Education’s Reading Framework also emphasises the importance of fluency, recognising its critical role in comprehension. With this trial, the EEF aims to assess the impact of the KS2 Reading Fluency Project through a randomised controlled trial, involving 180 schools across the country.
Participating schools have been randomly assigned to either a 'treatment' group, which has received the training and is well underway with delivering the project, or a 'control' group, which will not deliver the project but will assist in data collection. The trial will focus exclusively on the impact on Year 6 pupils, and data will be collected by independent evaluators.
How does the data collection differ from our normal Reading Fluency Project rounds?
Usually, pre- and post-intervention assessment data is collected for participating students, and teachers administer these assessments. Our results are staggering and the average improvement made by KS2 pupils, over eight weeks of the intervention, is two years and three months*. To date, we have only administered these tests to pupils actually receiving the intervention. The EEF trial differs in that instead of testing pre- and post- intervention, treatment schools’ final assessment outcomes will be compared with that of control schools. They continued with business as usual this year.
Our bespoke, school-level, Early Project Visits have taken place, and teachers are already reporting an improvement in reading confidence among participating students. Anecdotally, a number of teachers have suggested that students are starting to see themselves as readers; small and regular successes are leading to improved self-esteem and most importantly, some are already volitionally reaching for a book beyond the fluency lessons.
The final report on the trial’s outcomes will be published in summer 2026 so watch this space!
Whilst the trial continues, we are also running the project in other key stages and hearing anecdotes from delighted teachers about the impact the project is having on their readers.
If you would like to discover the impact that this project could have for pupils’ reading in your school, we are now taking bookings for the Reading Fluency Project beginning in January 2025. The project runs for KS1 (year 2-3), KS2, KS3 and KS4. We are also launching a pilot of the Year 1 Reading Fluency Project: Foundational Fluency. To express an interest in joining us, or find out more about any of our Reading Fluency Projects, please email us at reading.fluency@hfleducation.org.
*according to our results using the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension
Kathy Roe
