Using the Power of Pictures to improve pupil attainment in schools

INTERVENTION: Schools will be randomly allocated to either the intervention or the control group. For the randomisation, blocking will be used to improve cross‐arm comparability of schools and also to improve precision of estimates. There will be four blocks, defined on the basis of class composition by English as an Additional Language (EAL) (high vs. low) and class composition by eligibility for Free School Meals (FSM) (high vs. low). This approach will help to ensure that our treatment and control groups are well balanced in terms of these characteristics, which are likely to be correlated with our outcome measures (EEF, 2015b). High and low EAL and FSM in these definitions will be defined as above and below by the sample median to ensure that block sizes are approximately equal (which may not be the case if we used population, rather than sample, characteristics). Randomisation will be designed to achieve an equal number of schools in each arm (i.e. 60 control and 60 treatment). Each school will be assigned a randomly generated number (setting a stable seed for the random number generation). Schools will be sorted by block and random number and will be assigned to the treatment arm and to the control arm in turn. Randomisation will be carried out by UCL in Stata and the code used to carry out the process will be recorded and reported in the final report. Schools allocated to the intervention group will receive the Power of Pictures (PoP) intervention, which operates as follows: PoP operates as follows. The PoP team selects picture book authors with whom they wish to work. This selection is based on the quality and relevance of a specific book from the author’s work, which will be used for the intervention. The PoP team work with the author and the illustrator (always the same person) of this book throughout the course of the intervention. The author‐illustrator is selected based on the quality of their text and their experience of talking about their process either through di CONDITION: Writing attainment at the end of year 5 ; Not Applicable ; Writing attainment PRIMARY OUTCOME: Writing attainment, assessed using the Writing Assessment Measure (WAM) at the end of the Year 5 school year in 2019. SECONDARY OUTCOME: Writing self‐efficacy, assessed using the Self‐Efficacy for Writing Scale (SEWS) (adapted to ensure age appropriateness) at the end of the Year 5 school year in 2019. INCLUSION CRITERIA: 1. North East England, London and East Sussex based 2. Agree to provide student data so that it is possible to apply for data from the National Pupil Database 3. Identify a lead teacher from Year 5 for participation (all pupils in this teacher's class will participate in the trial) 4. Agree to cooperate with the project and evaluation teams during the trial Where possible it will aim to recruit schools that have larger populations of individuals receiving Free School Meals (FSM) than the national average of 15.3 per cent of pupils aged 5‐10 (DfE, 2016).