The Ministry of Education, Training
and Employment is partnering with the Webster Foundation to launch Catch Up
Literacy, a pilot intervention programme for struggling readers in Cayman
primary schools.
More than 30 education
professionals from government schools were trained to use this
internationally-recognised reading intervention on 25 and 26 October.
Education Minister Rolston Anglin
said that the programme is very timely and important to development.
“As one of the strategic priorities
of the ministry is to improve our students’ literacy standards, we are very
thankful that the Webster Foundation sees literacy as important and that they
are supportive of our efforts to improve our students’ achievements,” he said.
The Webster Foundation is fully
funding this pilot scheme in the Cayman Islands. It was established in 1984 by members of the
family of James Samuel Webster of Cayman and Jamaica.
Catch Up Literacy is a reading
programme that has had success in helping struggling readers in the UK and
Australia. It is also being started in
Ireland.
Advancing education
One of the Webster Foundation’s
objectives is the advancement of education in the Cayman Islands. The Webster Foundation believes that Catch Up
Literacy will make a major contribution to the future educational achievements
of Caymanian schoolchildren.
Anne Briggs, the newly appointed
literacy specialist in the ministry, said that the reading intervention will be
delivered to approximately 100 students between now and the end of the school
year by trained teachers’ aides and teachers.
The intervention consists of two
15-minute sessions per week for an individual student, and students are
typically in the programs for seven to eight months.
Catch Up director Julie Lawes
delivered the training along with the developer of the programme, Dee Reid.
“We have long been aware of the
impact that Catch Up Literacy can have for children who are struggling to learn
to read,” Ms Lawes said. “We are
delighted with the new large scale research that confirms that children helped
by Catch Up achieve almost two and a half times the progress of a typically
developing child — which is all the more remarkable when you remember that
struggling readers by definition make much less progress than typical
children.”
Ms Lawes said that the outcomes of
the programme are not confined to reading.
Often, the disruptive behaviour that accompanies students who struggle
to read lessens.
Also, schools report a better
understanding of the individual struggling reader’s strengths and weaknesses
and find it easier to help ‘difficult to reach’ children.
The intervention also enhances the
literacy teaching skills of learning support assistants and teachers.
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