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Evidence 4 ~ One Story

One particular line of numbers caught my attention.

F

13

05:11

06:05

00:06

5 hrs

continuing

White British

truancy

It’s the “Data Story” of a thirteen year old white British girl with truancy issues who struggles with reading and agreed to start meeting with a ThatReadingThing tutor.  I’m going to call her Amber.

At their first session, her reading age was 5 years and 11 months which is what we would expect of a child at some point in Year 1.

Assuming that she’s now in Year 8, she hasn’t made much progress in the intervening seven years at school.

Amber met with her tutor five times and they probably worked on reading for about 45 – 50 minutes in each of those sessions.  I wonder how many weeks it took to get in five sessions?  In my experience, a young person with a history of truanting shows up sporadically at best.

However, thanks to this thirteen year old’s willingness to risk doing the very thing that she tends to run away from and, thanks to the dedication of one TRT tutor, Amber gained six whole months on her reading age.

She needs to gain at least another four years if she is going to cope with the GCSE curriculum, but I’m hoping for the best for her.

Amber is still committed to showing up for TRT sessions and I look forward to finding out what happens in the next five hours.