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HFL Education’s KS2 Reading Fluency Project is a targeted intervention aiming to improve reading comprehension for upper Key Stage 2 pupils who are identified as working below age-related expectations in reading comprehension.

The intervention is designed to improve fluent reading of age-appropriate texts, with a focus on prosody, through six core strategies: modelled expert prosody, echo reading, repeated reading, text marking, performance reading, and modelling comprehension strategies. The project requires the class teacher to deliver the intervention to 6 – 8 identified pupils for 20 minutes, twice a week, across 8 weeks.

Teachers are trained to deliver the project by experienced HFL Education project advisers. Training is delivered remotely and consists of a one-day launch event, a remote paired school coaching session to support implementation, a mid-project twilight session and a final reflection session to plan next steps for embedding practice beyond the project. The project will be delivered in autumn term 2024.

As part of the Department for Education’s Accelerator Fund, the EEF is commissioning a number of trials of programmes that show promise for increasing pupil attainment.

EEF identified developing reading fluency as a high impact approach in our KS2 Literacy Guidance Report, however to date EEF has not evaluated many programmes that specifically focus on improving reading fluency. The approaches to the teaching of fluency included within this project align with the evidence base on how to teach oral reading fluency and provides schools with a clear and structured approach.

To explore the potential of the KS2 Reading Fluency Project, the EEF has initiated a trial aimed at understanding the impact of this approach.

This project will be evaluated by Verian (previously known as Kantar Public) through a randomised controlled trial (RCT). This will be an efficacy trial, meaning the programme will be tested under best possible conditions. Participating schools will be randomly allocated to either the ​‘treatment’ group – who will receive the training and deliver the project, or the ​‘control’ group – who will not receive the project. RCTs are the best way to find out the impact of the approach being tested.

The efficacy trial will measure the impact of the KS2 Reading Fluency Project on a measure of reading comprehension, using the York Assessment of Reading for Comprehension (YARC). The evaluation will also measure the impact on KS2 reading outcomes. An Implementation and Process evaluation will be conducted alongside the impact evaluation to explore implementation and perception of the KS2 Reading Fluency Project.