Improving Writing Quality: Evaluation Report and Executive Summary

23 primary schools (11 intervention, 12 comparison), Year 6

Year 6 pupils (aged 10-11) in Calderdale, West Yorkshire, England

EEF-funded EFFICACY trial of Self-Regulated Strategy Development delivered as IPEELL (Introduction, Point, Explain, Ending, Links, Language) combined with "memorable experiences" used as a writing stimulus. Cluster randomisation at school level with intention-to-treat analysis. Training was delivered by the North American developers of SRSD, adapted for the English context. Outcome was a writing test marked blind by independent evaluators - blind, but bespoke and treatment-adjacent rather than an independent standardised instrument. This is the trial that put SRSD on the EEF's promising list, and the number it produced is the largest in the writing archive.

Effect size approximately +0.74, reported by the EEF as around 9 months' additional progress in writing - one of the largest effects the EEF has ever published for any intervention. Effects were reported as strong for lower-performing pupils and beneficial across socioeconomic groups. The result did not survive the scale-up: the subsequent effectiveness trial (Torgerson et al. 2018, Calderdale Excellence Partnership: IPEELL) returned +0.11 over two years and -0.09 over one, neither statistically significant, with significant NEGATIVE effects on reading, spelling and maths. The evaluators of the second trial attribute the difference to newly recruited trainers rather than the developers, delivery in Years 5-6 rather than Years 6-7, and use across the full prior-attainment range rather than with low attainers only. IPEELL was subsequently removed from the EEF's "promising projects" list.

Low. School-level randomisation with an independent evaluator and blind marking. The threat to this estimate is not genetic confounding but developer involvement, small school count (23), and an outcome measure built for the trial.