Summary

Background

Resource Teachers: Literacy (RT:Lits) are a specialist group of registered teachers who work with students in years 1 to 8 who are experiencing literacy difficulties, and their teachers. An RT:Lit works for a designated cluster of schools, and is based at a host school.

Sixty-eight RT:Lits were previously employed as Resource Teachers of Reading (RTR). At the beginning of 2001 the position of the RTR was replaced by that of RT:Lits, with the role being modified to allow RT:Lits to focus more on providing support to teachers and other school staff, rather than directly to the students concerned. In addition, the number of teachers involved increased gradually over the year, from 68 to over 100. The Annual Report 2001 was an account of the work of RT:Lits in their first year albeit not a complete one in the sense that teachers were being appointed throughout the year. Reports of previous years' data from the RTR programme have appeared annually in The Research Bulletin – first in the May 1993 edition (on 1992 data) and the last in the June 2001 edition (on 2000 data).

The role of RT:Lits will further develop and they will increasingly spend more time working with teachers and staff in the area of literacy difficulties and less time working with individual students. This period of transition in the role of RT:Lits is expected to continue to evolve in the next few years. The exact nature of the information collected in the next few years will also involve a settling down process.

Methodology

In November 2002, the RT:Lit Annual Report was sent to all RT:Lits to complete. The RT:Lit Annual Report provides for individual student data to be reported. It is in three parts:

• an Annual Return for Teachers (Part A ) covering all aspects of the work that RT:Lits undertake and the number of students they had enrolled on their books in 2002;
• an Annual Return for Students (Part B) to be completed for each student the RT:Lit worked with in 2002, gathering data on age, gender, ethnicity and reading levels, on entry to and discharge from the programme.
• an Annual Return for Students (Part C) was introduced in 2002 to record information on students that the RT:Lits worked with as part of a group (as opposed to individual lessons given by RT:Lits to students). Here, ethnicity, age, gender, the area of literacy the RT:Lit was working on with the student, the number of sessions and the status of the child's progress are recorded.

Completed Reports were received from 107 RT:Lits (out of 109). The following report summarises the data for 2002.