SPOKES: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary
Author: Tracey, Louise
Date: 2016-07-00
Type: Reports - Research
Subjects: Parent Education,Parents as Teachers,Reading Instruction,Reading Difficulties,Elementary School Students,Young Children,Teaching Methods,Reading Skills,Program Evaluation,Program Effectiveness,Randomized Controlled Trials,Phonetics,Word Recognition,Alphabets,Social Development,Emotional Development,Parent Attitudes,Foreign Countries,Literacy Education,Intervention,Reading Tests,Behavior Problems,Child Behavior,Questionnaires,Screening Tests,Pretests Posttests,Interviews,Statistical Analysis

The SPOKES (Supporting Parents on Kids Education in Schools) programme is a ten-week intervention for parents designed to help struggling readers in Year 1. The programme teaches parents strategies to support their children's reading such as listening to children read, pausing to let them work out words, and praising them when they concentrate and problem-solve. The programme was based primarily in Plymouth and was conducted with six cohorts of children and parents, one cohort each term from Spring term 2012 to Autumn term 2014. This evaluation was designed to assess the impact of the programme on children's reading outcomes. It was a randomised controlled trial involving the parents of 808 children from 68 primary schools. Parents of Year 1 children identified as 'struggling readers' were recruited through their child's school to participate in the project. Parents of the intervention children participated in ten weekly SPOKES sessions over one term and parents of children in a comparison group received books and newsletters. The impact evaluation measured the impact of SPOKES--on children's literacy (letter identification, word identification, and phonetic awareness) and on a range of social and emotional outcomes--at the end of the programme and at six- and twelve-month follow up points. The process evaluation was designed to collect parents' views and experiences of SPOKES, to help to explain the findings from of the impact evaluation, and to provide feedback to inform the future design and delivery of the programme. Key conclusions are: (1) There is no evidence that SPOKES had an effect on the standardised reading outcomes or the social and emotional outcomes of the participating children, overall; (2) There is no evidence that SPOKES had an effect on the standardised reading outcomes or the social and emotional outcomes of the participating children, overall; (3) Parents who participated in the SPOKES programme were very positive about it and believed that their children's literacy was enhanced from their participation; (4) Factors that may have contributed to the lack of overall impact include a low attendance rate and a sample that included children of higher ability than the programme was designed for; and (5) In addition to the pre-agreed analysis, the evaluation team also assessed the impact of SPOKES on Key Stage 1 scores for the subgroup of pupils who had reached KS1. This analysis is promising and the positive results warrant future research and further analysis of all the participants at the end KS1. These findings have moderate security. The study was described as a large, well-designed, two-armed randomised controlled trial with randomisation at the pupil level. The trial was classified as an efficacy trial, meaning that it sought to test whether the intervention can work under ideal or developer-led conditions. For the pupils included in the analysis, those whose parents were allocated to receive the intervention were observed to be similar to the pupils in the comparison group. In this efficacy trial there was no evidence, for the intervention group as a whole, that SPOKES had an impact on the outcomes specified in the trial protocol at post-test or at six- and twelve-month follow-up.