The Literacy Hour

By Stephen Machin, Sandra Mcnally. Social Science Research Network, 2008

220 citations recorded by the source corpus.

In this paper, we evaluate the effect of the literacy hour in English primary schools on pupil attainment. The National Literacy Project (NLP) was undertaken in about 400 English primary schools in 1997 and 1998. We compare the reading and overall English attainment of children in NLP schools as compared to a set of control schools at the end of primary school education (age 11). We also compare the overall English performance of these children when they have reached the end of their compulsory education (age 16). We find a larger increase in attainment in reading and English for pupils in NLP schools as compared to pupils not exposed to the literacy hour between 1996 and 1998. We also find modest, but positive effects from exposure to the literacy hour that persist to age 16, as GCSE English performance is seen to be higher for children affected by the NLP introduction. Since there are gender gaps in English performance (in favour of girls), we consider whether the literacy hour has had a differential impact by gender. We find some evidence that at age 11, boys received a greater benefit than girls. Finally, we show the policy to be cost effective. These findings are of strong significance when placed into the wider education debate about what works best in schools for improving pupil performance. The evidence reported here suggests that public policy aimed at changing the content and structure of teaching can significantly raise pupil attainment.

Subfields: Education

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/37d7f75a0b92bc7dea68e7816fada00fb927861a

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Citations in the corpus

Is Traditional Teaching Really All That Bad? A Within-Student Between-Subject Approach (2011, background): “Machin and McNally (2008) analyze the effect of the introduction of the “literacy hour” in English primary schools in the late 1990s by the British government.”
Teacher Unions, Teacher Pay and Student Performance in India: A Pupil Fixed Effects Approach (2008, unknown): “Although quasi-experimental approaches such as propensity score matching methods have been used to evaluate education program impacts (e.g. Machin and McNally, 2004), they require the assumption that matching based on pre-treatment observables adequately captures all relevant characteristics of…”
Challenges in Educational Reform: An Experiment on Active Learning in Mathematics (2015, background): “Machin and McNally (2008) evaluate the reading and overall English attainment of a national pedagogical strategy designed to raise standards of literacy in primary schools through the introduction of a structured and pre-specified pedagogical strategy.”
Accounting for Intergenerational Income Persistence: Noncognitive Skills, Ability and Education (2006, background): “This can be done either by universal interventions that are more effective for poor children, for example high quality pre-school childcare (Currie, 2001) and the UK literacy hour (Machin and McNally, 2004), or by directing resources exclusively at poorer schools or communities.”
Is Free School Meal Status a Valid Proxy for Socio- Economic Status (in Schools Research)? (2007, background): “Evaluations of education policies, e.g., Excellence in Cities (Machin et al., 2004) and the Literacy Hour (Machin and McNally 2004);7 4.”
Valuing School Quality Using Boundary Discontinuities. CEE DP 132. (2013, background): “To illustrate this, consider that Machin and McNally (2008) estimate the labour market return to a one percentile increase in age-10 test scores, for a cohort of children raised in the 1970s and 1980s, to be about 0.”
Gender and Student Achievement in English Schools (2005, background): “They are largely within 8 Machin and McNally (2004) explain the details of the ‘literacy hour’ and its evaluation in some detail.”