29 October 1999

Anyone trying to penetrate the claims of various programmes might agree with the authors of What Works for Slow Readers? The Effectiveness of Early Intervention Schemes that reading research "is a jungle, and quantitative evaluations of early interventions are among its densest thickets". (National Federation for Educational Research £8, tel: 01753 574123).Greg Brooks, Nicola Flanagan, Zenta Henkhuzens and Dougal Hutchison take existing evaluations of 20 early intervention programmes (for pupils who are underachieving between Years 1 and 4). Programmes reviewed include Reading Recovery (the largest), the Docklands Learning Acceleration Project, and THRASS (Teaching Handwriting Reading And Spelling Skills) and they are usefully set out in terms of approach, age range, duration, and period of teaching time. Each programme is then described individually and the degree to which they succeed or not is reported.....

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