Peer Assisted Learning Strategies – UK (PALS-UK) raises reading attainment by developing pupils’ oral reading fluency and reading comprehension. PALS-UK is delivered to the whole class for 30 – 35 minutes, three times a week. It is centred on pupils working together in pairs to engage in four activities: partner reading; retell; paragraph shrinking; and prediction relay. PALS-UK is available for Key Stages 2 and 3. The version the EEF tested was delivered to year 5 classes over 20 weeks.
PALS was developed by Douglas Fuchs, Lynn Fuchs, and other researchers from Vanderbilt University. The intervention was adapted for the UK context and is delivered by Dr Emma Vardy (Nottingham Trent University) and Professor Helen Breadmore (University of Birmingham).
The PALS approach has been extensively implemented in the United States, with a number of studies reporting positive impacts. The EEF’s Teaching and Learning Toolkit shows there is strong evidence that both peer tutoring and the teaching of reading comprehension strategies, two of the main strategies used in the PALS-UK programme, can have a high impact on pupil outcomes.
The EEF has trialled this programme twice at efficacy level. This means that it was trialled in a small number of schools in the best possible conditions.
The first EEF efficacy trial of PALS-UK was disrupted by the COVID-19 pandemic and so the results had a low security rating. The second efficacy trial of PALS-UK found that children in PALS-UK schools made the equivalent of two months additional progress in reading, on average, compared to children in control schools. This result has a three-padlock security rating, meaning we are moderately confident that this difference was due to the intervention and not to other factors. Pupils eligible for free school meals (FSM) made the equivalent of one month’s additional progress in reading, on average, compared to children eligible for FSM in the control schools. However, this finding is less secure than the main result, and further analysis suggests that the impact of PALS-UK on children eligible for FSM was very similar to the impact for other children.
Overall, these results suggest that PALS-UK can have a positive impact on children’s reading attainment. These positive results have led the EEF to designate PALS-UK as a ‘Promising Programme’.
The EEF is currently evaluating PALS-UK at effectiveness level, to evaluate its impact when delivered on a wider scale under everyday conditions.- 114 schools participated in the latest efficacy trial. The schools were located in The North, the East Midlands and Humber, and the West Midlands.
- 33% of the pupils in the trial were eligible for FSM. This is higher than the national average.
- Average Key Stage 2 Reading scores across the schools that were recruited to the trial were close to the national average.
- 78% of the schools involved were Ofsted-rated Good or Outstanding, which is slightly lower than the national average.
- Around 21% of pupils in the schools had English as an additional language (slightly higher than the national average) and 15% of pupils were designated SEND (slightly higher than the national average).
Teachers delivering the intervention receive one day of in-person training after which they support pupils in their class to participate in PALS-UK paired reading sessions for 30 – 35 minutes three times per week for at least 20 weeks. The first four weeks are spent training the pupils in the four PALS-UK paired reading activities. Teachers are supplied with a manual that provides resources for this four-week pupil training period. Teachers then attend a 90 minute online top up session and pupils then complete the 16 remaining weeks of the paired reading activities.
For PALS-UK sessions, pupils need access to high-quality, engaging books that provide an appropriate level of challenge. School leadership team support, the training and programme resources, and timetabled sessions for PALS-UK were reported to have facilitated successful delivery in schools that took part in the trial. There is tentative evidence to suggest that pupils with SEND may have benefited because the one-to-one support provided by PALS-UK may be particularly beneficial for them.
PALS-UK is not designed to address all aspects of reading development or all aspects of the reading curriculum, so schools will need to ensure that these areas of learning are being addressed outside of PALS-UK sessions. Pupil absenteeism, competing priorities within schools, and challenges managing pupil pairings made it challenging for some schools to implement PALS-UK in the trial. These challenges may be harder to manage for smaller schools.
For the programme as trialled in the second efficacy evaluation, the average cost of PALS-UK for one school was around £630, or £12.69 per pupil per year when averaged over three years. This is an estimate of holistic school costs to implement the programme at the time of the evaluation.
For more information about accessing PALS-UK outside the current EEF trial, please visit: Peer Assisted Learning Strategies (PALS-UK) | Nottingham Trent University.
The latest EEF efficacy trial included a school visit from the PALS-UK team. Although these visits are not arranged as standard outside of the trial, they are available on request if schools feel they need support. In the latest efficacy trial schools were also provided with a box of reading books. These boxes are not included in the standard cost of the programme but can be purchased as an additional extra. This extra supply of reading books is recommended for schools where current book stocks might not be sufficient.