Twenty in twenty

At our Butterfly Saturday Reading Schools we don’t normally routinely re-test our children until they have completed a term-and-a-half, about thirty hours of two-hour classes, with us.

More than 12 Months’ Improvement in Just 20 Hours

But in December 2007 we reported back to the Octavia Foundation on twenty children who had benefited from Butterfly Bursaries, funded by the Foundation for one term – about twenty hours’ teaching. The progress made by the children, all of whom came from families living in social housing, was impressive: an average reading improvement of over twelve months in about twenty hours.

The children with the most dramatic improvements in reading level tend often to be those with the most dramatic initial deficits in reading attainment. For example, a boy aged 7 years 10 months had an initial reading age of 0 (i.e. he could not read). At the end of term his reading age had improved radically to 6 years 3 months.