Education Endowment Foundation:Helping Handwriting Shine

Helping Handwriting Shine

University of Leeds
Implementation costThe cost estimates in the Toolkits are based on the average cost of delivering the intervention.
Evidence strengthThis rating provides an overall estimate of the robustness of the evidence, to help support professional decision-making in schools.
Impact (months)The impact measure shows the number of additional months of progress made, on average, by children and young people who received the intervention, compared to similar children and young people who did not.
0
months
Project info

Independent Evaluator

NFER logo
NFER
Testing a way to improve children’s writing composition by improving handwriting
Pupils: 3854 Schools: 103 Grant: TBC
Key Stage: 1, 2 Duration: 2 year(s) 2 month(s) Type of Trial: Efficacy Trial
Completed November 2020

Helping Handwriting Shine (HHS) is a programme that adopts approaches used by occupational therapists to improve handwriting for use in the classroom by school staff. The programme aims to support pupils to produce fast, accurate and legible writing. In this trial, HHS was implemented as a universal approach in Year 2 (6−7 years) and a targeted approach in Year 5 (9−10 years). The Year 5 children eligible to receive the intervention were slow and effortful hand writers or those with legibility issues unable to read their own handwriting.

HHS is an eight-week programme with three 30-minute sessions per week. Each session follows a standard structure consisting of three elements: preparing for handwriting, a warm-up pencil control activity, and an explicit handwriting activity. Sessions also integrate metacognitive approaches which encourage children to plan and evaluate their task.

This project aimed to train primary teachers and teaching assistants (TAs) to use occupational therapy approaches, to support children’s handwriting, and evaluate whether the approach could improve the overall quality of children’s writing.The programme was designed and delivered by a team from the School of Psychology at the University of Leeds and the Bradford Institute of Health Research. In this trial, the programme was implemented as a universal approach in Year 2 (age six to seven) and a targeted approach in Year 5 (age nine to ten). The Year 5 children eligible to receive the intervention were slow and effortful hand writers or those with legibility issues unable to read their own handwriting.

The eight-week intervention was spread across two four-week blocks on either side of the Christmas break, with three 30-minute sessions per week. Each session followed a standard structure consisting of three elements: preparing for handwriting, a warm-up pencil control activity, and an explicit handwriting activity. Sessions also integrated metacognitive approaches which encouraged children to plan and evaluate their work. Training for staff included one full-day session (five to six hours), with follow-on support available based on individual school need. A second half-day of training was added to give support with embedding the approach between the end of the eight-week programme and post-testing at the end of the school year.

The research consisted of two randomised controlled efficacy trials in 103 schools: a Year 5 experiment where treatment and control pupils were within the same school (371 pupils) and a Year 2 experiment where the comparison group were drawn from different schools (3,854 pupils). The process evaluation involved case studies in twelve treatment schools (which used interviews and observations), observations of the training for staff, and analysis of intervention delivery logs. The trial took place in schools between June 2018 and July 2019.

  1. Children in the Helping Handwriting Shine schools who were in Year 2 and experienced the universal intervention made no additional progress, on average, in their overall writing ability compared to children in the control group. The range of possible impacts for the universal programme in Year 2 include small negative effects of two months less progress and small positive effects of up to one month’s progress. This result has a high security rating.
  2. Children in the Helping Handwriting Shine schools who were in Year 5 and experienced the targeted intervention made the equivalent of two additional months’ progress in their overall writing ability compared to children in the control group. The range of possible impacts for the targeted programme in Year 5 include small negative effects of one month less progress and moderate positive effects of up to four months’ progress. This result has a moderate to high security rating.
  3. Children in the Helping Handwriting Shine schools, either in Year 2 or Year 5, made, on average, no additional progress in writing composition. This result may have lower security than the overall findings. Exploratory analysis also suggests that it is unlikely the Helping Handwriting Shine programme increased or decreased children’s handwriting speed.
  4. Adherence to the eight-week programme was, on average, medium to high. There were some potential limitations with the delivery logs meaning these findings should be viewed with caution.
  5. Staff and pupils viewed the programme positively, noticing improvements in children’s handwriting during the eight-week intervention. Staff were of the opinion that the programme had improved their ability to teach handwriting and that it was relatively easy to implement.
Outcome/​Group
ImpactThe size of the difference between pupils in this trial and other pupils
SecurityHow confident are we in this result?
Writing (Year 2)
0
Months' progress
Writing (Year 5)
+2
Months' progress