RILL UK

COVID-19 restructured daily life, making normal education delivery impossible. Our aim in the Remote Instruction of Language and Literacy (RILL) project is to deliver effective, remote tuition to Key Stage 2 pupils across the UK. The RILL programme uses theoretically-motivated principles from the reading science literature (e.g., Suggate, 2016; Hatcher et al., 2006; Clarke, 2010), takes the best indicators of reading success for this age group, and presents educators with an eight-to-ten week programme of weekly sessions. Each session focuses on foundational reading skills such as vocabulary, phonics and understanding, all adapted to promote a fun learning experience, suitable for a remote teaching setting. Educators can choose to conduct lessons synchronously, in which the teacher meets the child online over Teams and conducts a live lesson. Alternatively, the child can do the tasks asynchronously and independently, and the educator can view/grade the work at a later point. Importantly, the materials are freely available for teachers and students to use.

In our original project (April - November 2020), we delivered RILL to over 200 children from all over the UK via parent recruitment. Whilst data analysis is in progress (and will be released on this page in April 2021), informal interviews showed that a) children enjoyed the programme, and parents were absolved of the onerous feeling of teaching responsibility over the lockdown period, b) children and parents feel more confident in their online learning experience now, during the third lockdown, and c) children’s literacy and reading practice may not have dipped (self-reports).

We are currently developing another version of RILL (RILL-in-school) as a catch-up tool to ensure that children's literacy skills rapidly recover from any deficits caused by school absences. Our eventual aim is to make the programme freely available to every school in Wales (bilingual Welsh and English) and England, and to adapt the materials for Key Stage 1 children.