Background
Why do we need Every Child Counts?
Many things can go wrong for children, some preventable and some not. Every single issue that has the potential to prevent them being safe, healthy, happy and successful needs tackling. The Every Child a Reader programme has demonstrated that skilled intervention support from highly trained teachers can make an early and lasting difference in preventing failure for vulnerable children in terms of literacy skills. We now need to develop a parallel approach to prevent early failure within key areas of mathematical development.
Mathematics failure matters. We know that:
- 15 million adults in the UK have very poor numeracy skills
- One in six companies currently have to provide remedial mathematics classes
- Numeracy failure starts early – each year around 35,000 eleven year olds (6% of their age group) leave primary school with numeracy skills at or below the level expected of the average seven year old
- Numeracy failure carries high social costs – the proportion of the prison population with very poor numeracy skills, for example, is even greater than the proportion with poor literacy skills
Current solutions to these problems have proved ineffective. The percentage of children leaving primary school with very poor numeracy skills has remained static nationally over the last five years, at a time when mathematics standards as a whole have risen steadily in schools.
Every Child Counts is a three year programme to develop and test out a highly effective numeracy intervention to tackle these children’s difficulties early. The programme will be led by the business and charitable sector, who are providing £5M to support the scheme. Government have committed to more than match contributions from business and charities, and to rolling out the programme nationally from 2010 if it is successful.
Context
In 2005, the KPMG Foundation set up the Every Child a Reader programme, designed to tackle literacy difficulties by providing highly skilled one-to-one tuition to six year olds who have failed to learn to read. The three year, £10M scheme was funded by a partnership of businesses and charitable trusts, including the Man Group plc, the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation, two Sainsbury Trusts, SHINE and the Mercers’ Company, with matched funding from government.
Every Child a Reader has been outstandingly successful. Children on the programme have made four times the normal rate of progress, with eight out of ten catching up completely with their peers after just 38 hours of one-to-one teaching. The return on investment from the programme, in terms of the lifelong social costs that accrue from early poor literacy skills, has been documented at between £15 and £18 for every £1 spent.
The impact and cost benefits of the Every Child a Reader programme have persuaded government to seek a similar approach for the 35,000 children a year who have the greatest difficulties with mathematics. The leadership and involvement of the business sector is seen as vital to this enterprise, as expressed by both the Prime Minister and Secretary of State for Children, Schools and Families.
The scheme
Every Child a Reader uses an internationally researched literacy programme called Reading Recovery that already has a proven track record of success. No programme with a similarly large research base exists for numeracy, although there are a number of interventions in use which are currently being researched and evaluated by the Every Child a Chance trust and the Primary National Strategy. The government’s Williams Review into Primary Mathematics is also considering evidence from these interventions.
Early evidence from one programme developed in the London borough of Hackney is very promising. The programme is called Numeracy Recovery. It is aimed at six and seven year old children who, after two years of schooling, show they are struggling to understand the number system and basic calculation. Children taking part in Numeracy Recovery receive individual tuition from specially trained teachers for half an hour daily over three months. Evaluation has showed that of 412 children on the programme in the last three years, none of whom were predicted to achieve nationally expected levels at the age of seven, 83% achieved nationally expected levels as a result of the 1-1 Numeracy Recovery lessons. In the schools piloting the intervention, there was a rise of 15 percentage points in the children gaining nationally expected levels at the age of 7 (the end of Key Stage 1), compared with an average rise of 3 percentage points across all the borough’s schools
Numeracy Recovery is currently a small-scale programme operating effectively in three local authorities. It has no national infrastructure and its evaluation is substantial but local. It is likely to benefit from incorporating effective elements of other schemes that are available. The key objective for Every Child Counts is to investigate what those elements might be, and, with advice from the Williams Review of Primary Mathematics and other experts in the field, develop a comprehensive programme that can be tested out more widely.
Core objectives
Over three years Every Child Counts will build a programme that will enable every child who needs early numeracy support to receive it. Work will include:
- Establishing an advisory group of stakeholders that will meet regularly
- Commissioning an evaluation with interim reporting to shape development
- Setting up a national infrastructure to provide training and quality assurance
- Incrementally training local-authority-based Teacher Trainers and school-based specialist teachers, building up to 84 trainers and 1600 teachers by 2010/2011
- Expanding the number of schools involved from 30 to 1600
- Researching and documenting the return on investment from the programme
- Ensuring government can make informed decisions about wider roll out.
Outcomes
The outcome of Every Child Counts will be a fully researched and developed model that can be picked up by government so as to reach every child who needs early numeracy support. Over the course of the development phase, 17,000 children will benefit. By 2010-11 the programme will be in a position to reach 30,000 children a year who are struggling with numeracy and enable more than 8 out of 10 of them to get back to average levels for their age after an anticipated 12-20 weeks of daily teaching.