This summary was originally published in Marshall Memo 1061 on November 11, 2024. It was shared with permission from the Marshall Memo, a weekly roundup of important ideas and research in K-12 education.

In this article in Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk, Sinéad Harmey and Jake Anders (University College London) report on their study of 6,023 U.K. primary-grade students who took part in Reading Recovery (intensive one-on-one tutoring for 12-20 weeks) and were given the Phonics Screening Check (PSC) at the end of the school year. The PSC assessment, which is given in U.K. primary schools, has students read 20 real words and 20 pseudo words, the latter accompanied by pictures of imaginary creatures that students are asked to name (versus trying to match the pseudo words with words in their vocabulary), providing data on students’ decoding skills.

What did the study find? Students who had completed Reading Recovery did better on the PSC phonics assessment than students who were still engaged with the program, and those students did better on the PSC than students who had not yet begun Reading Recovery. The study also found that the more time had passed between students completing Reading Recovery and the PSC assessment, the better students did at decoding. This is significant because students who start Reading Recovery at the beginning of the school year are those with the lowest prior literacy achievement. In other words, the neediest students gained the most from Reading Recovery.

An important piece of context for this study: U.K. primary schools have a heavy emphasis on phonics, so students referred to Reading Recovery had already had systematic phonics instruction in kindergarten and yet were not decoding well. It appears that Reading Recovery, with its one-on-one instruction, frequent diagnosis, and linking reading with writing, found a way to crack the phonics code for most students.

In sum, say Harmey and Anders, Reading Recovery “provides schools with an effective early literacy intervention for children struggling with early literacy learning.”

“The Link Between Completing Reading Recovery and Performance on a Phonics Screening Check” by Sinéad Harmey and Jake Anders in Journal of Education for Students Placed At Risk, October-December 2024 (Vol. 29, #4, pp. 311-331); the authors can be reached at  and .