BLITZ Key Stage 1 reading intervention - Wrexham

Wrexham's 'Blitz' scheme is proving effective in helping Year One pupils who are already struggling with literacy skills to catch up on their reading. The children take part in regular 20 minute Blitz sessions, in small groups, to help make sure that their skills are up to speed by the end of the year.

So what exactly is Blitz? Blitz is a literacy intervention in Key Stage 1, developed by Linda Perry of East Sussex LEA, to provide a tightly structured teaching programme aimed at helping children who are having considerable difficulty in getting started in literacy. It provides a gentle, enjoyable push-start into reading and writing for pupils who, despite having had phonics teaching in Early Years, have made little or no progress.

The programme is based on regular reading of carefully chosen books from a range of reading schemes - books which can be read in a few minutes and enjoyed for their rhyming words, illustrations, humour and story line. There are word cards and games to accompany each book. New words are introduced gradually, while familiar words are constantly revisited.

Blitz is designed to be used daily for 20 minute sessions and can be delivered by an enthusiastic classroom assistant or nursery nurse. It is very easy to use, and no special training is needed. The costs are the cost of the Blitz materials pack, and the time of a classroom assistant. In Wrexham the programme is run for half an hour at least three times a week over three terms, usually with a group of about six pupils.

Siwan Meirion is the Basic Skills Advisory Teacher for Wrexham responsible for supporting schools in raising standards in basic skills. The Blitz scheme gets her seal of approval – because it delivers impressive results and appears to raise levels of achievement for every child involved, at a crucial early stage in learning. But it's also popular with pupils, with the teachers who deliver it and with headteachers.

As Siwan explains, there has been a Catch Up programme running for some years to support 7 year old pupils falling behind with their reading at Key Stage 2. It works well, but schools were looking for a literacy intervention at Key Stage 1 and Year One, so that pupils could be supported at an earlier stage - before they became discouraged or saw themselves as failed readers.

After trialling the Blitz programme in one primary school in 2002, Family Learning funds were used to run a Blitz pilot in three more Wrexham schools in 2003. Since then, some five or six schools have been funded each year to deliver a Blitz programme - with the support of Basic Skills Cymru's Strategic Intervention Grant. During 2007 Blitz is being funded to run in six more Wrexham schools.

Even when funding is no longer available, many schools that have participated in the Blitz programme are able to carry on using the approaches they've learned, and the materials they've acquired, using existing classroom assistants or nursery nurses.

Headteachers like the Blitz programme not only because pupils make real progress, but also because it's easy to use and the costs are manageable. They have also seen wider benefits – for example, one school has rotated the teachers in the Blitz role, so that teaching staff know how it works and can incorporate approaches into other classroom work.

Siwan particularly likes the pace and energy that Blitz provides: 'some children may have difficulties in sustaining concentration, and the fast pace, and variety of fun activities holds their attention well. It's not for special needs children, for whom other approaches may be more useful.'

The results are impressive. Siwan has evidence of pre- and post-Blitz test scores across a range of skills areas and without exception, the pupils reach significantly higher scores at the end of their Blitz experience. Some examples, using the Senter series Early Literacy Skills Screen test (a test which, like Blitz, is very easy to administer), show the following gains: one child had an entry score of 15 and at the end of the programme had a score of 82 (out of total of 112); another child with an entry score of 37/112 achieved a final score of 96/112; another moved from 51/112 to 100/112. All the children on Blitz make significant gains, regardless of their starting point.