In 2019, Charles Dickens Primary School became home to the London South Research School, consolidating our commitment to evidence-informed education. Being a research school brings the opportunity to develop programmes which can then be trialled in schools. For many years prior to this, we had taught reading through weekly comprehension lessons. We always tried to make these lessons as effective as possible by focusing on unfamiliar vocabulary upfront and teaching comprehension strategies as recommended in the EEF’s Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2. However, we felt a key element was missing. We realised it was fluency so, building on recommendation 2 of the EEF’s guidance report, we began using fluency strategies as part of our weekly comprehension lessons.

Then in 2021, the EEF put out a call for research schools to bid for funding, as part of their early pipeline development programme, to develop a scheme of work supporting the explicit teaching andpractise of reading fluency at Key Stage 2.

Our bid was approved, giving us the go-ahead to fully codify our approach and develop the Fluency Focus programme. Fluency Focus was initially trialled in 10 schools to test whether teachers found it feasible and acceptable to deliver.  After this, Fluency Focus was trialled in 20 more schools – a pilot trial, meaning it was externally evaluated. The report can be read here.  After the success of the first two trials, we are now scaling up to an efficacy trial involving 120 schools.  An efficacy trial is a randomised controlled trial, meaning there will be a group of schools that receive the intervention and a control group that does not. It’s an exciting time to be involved in fluency!