28% of pupils in English primary schools did not achieve the expected standard in either reading or writing at the end of Key Stage 1 in 2017; 27% did not achieve the expected standard at the end of Key Stage 2. That’s an average of 10 pupils in every year group in every school who have fallen behind and could be helped by an Every Child Counts programme.

The Education Endowment Foundation’s Improving Literacy in Key Stage One and Two reports both recommend that schools should ‘use high-quality structured interventions to help pupils who are struggling with their literacy’. It states that, although ‘schools should focus first on developing core classroom teaching strategies that improve the literacy capabilities of the whole class . . . nevertheless, it is likely that a small number of pupils will require additional support – in the form of high-quality, structured, targeted interventions – to make progress.’

ECC interventions meet all of the reports’ criteria for an effective intervention, including: