OxEd Whole Class - information for parents and carers

What is the purpose of the study?

This study is part of the work of CAL:ON Cymru - a national centre of excellence for literacy at Bangor University, funded by the Welsh Government.

Many children in Wales, as in other countries, struggle with poor oral language skills, which can later lead to difficulties in reading and writing. To address this challenge, an adaptation of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) was developed by researchers at Bangor University and our partners, OxEd and Assessment. The new adaptation, OxEd Whole Class, offers a series of Welsh- and English-language whole-class activities over twenty weeks, designed to support the oral language skills of learners aged 4-6.

OxEd Whole Class consists of 56 sessions, each lasting 20 minutes, delivered by class teachers using a combination of online resources (including digital slides, stories and songs) and paper-based materials (such as printed activity sheets). Our approach is evidence-based, meaning that all activities are carefully designed to support children in developing oral languages kills, with a focus on active listening skills, vocabulary growth, and narrative ability.

The purpose of this study is to test the effectiveness of the newly adaptated OxEd programme by measuring children’s oral language abilities before and after the intervention.

Benefits for your child

They will receive an adaptation of a programme which is shown to be effective at improving language and literacy skills.
Will complete fun, educational stories and activities.
Will develop literacy skills and confidence.

Evaluating the OxEd Whole Class programme

What will the evaluation process involve?

Your child’s class will participate in the OxEd Whole Class programme for 20 weeks. Your child’s class will be allocated to one of two groups: a September start group and a January start group.

The September start group will receive the OxEd Whole Class programme first and will be assessed before and immediately after roll-out.

Whilst the September start group receives the programme, the January start group will receive the traditional curriculum and provide two pre-programme assessments. This group will receive the programme after the September group have finished all the sessions and will be assessed for a third time after the programme.

Creating these groups is imperative as it provides us with an untreated comparison group. This will allow us to investigate the effects of receiving the traditional curriculum alone compared to the traditional combined with the OxEd curriculum.

We will use standardized literacy assessments to assess your child's current oral language skills level. These assessments will be administered online supervised by the schools appointed OxEd teacher and a member of the OxEd team.

At the end roll-out, the team will provide a short report on the schools' progress outlining the areas and skills most improved. Please note that this report will be based on all pupils within the school; your child's individual data will not be made available to anyone. We also note that these assessments will not be used as diagnostic tools to assess literacy difficulties.

During the project we may also ask parents to complete short questionnaires, however, this will not be mandatory for participation.

Final important information:

Confidentiality: Your child’s participation in the study will be treated as strictly confidential. Your data will be combined with those of the other participants The study results will be published in academic seminars, research talks or papers in scientific journals. However, all personal information will be removed so that it will not be possible for anyone to identify individuals in these publications.

Privacy, data access and GDPR: Your child's data will be stored in digital format and given a code for anonymity purposes. The study data including the data from the computerised tasks will be stored on a password-protected firewalled computer network. The password will only be known to the researchers directly involved in data analysis. The anonymised dataset may be deposited on a publicly available data repository so that other scientists can check and examine our results themselves. Access to your personal data will be restricted to the researchers although occasionally authorised Bangor University staff can request access for auditing purposes.

Withdrawing from the study: If your child decides that they do not wish to assent to participate in the programme (even though you as legal parent/guardian have provided consent), they are free not to take part. If you decide to withdraw from the study, you can request the removal of all of your child's data up until the point when the study dataset is analysed in a fully anonymised form (when it will no longer be possible to identify an individual participant’s study data).

Who is running and paying for the study? A team of researchers led by Prof. Manon Jones at Bangor University is running the study, which is funded by the Welsh Government.

Who has reviewed the study? The study has been given a favorable opinion by a Bangor University Approved Research Ethics Committee.

Who should I contact for more information?

Email: calon@bangor.ac.uk
Address: The School of Psychology and Sport Science, Brigantia Building, Penrallt Road, Bangor, Gwynedd LL57 2AS

Any complaints concerning this research should be addressed to Bangor University’s Senior Research Governance & Policy Officer, Governance Services, Bangor; e-mail: seniorresearchgovofficer@bangor.ac.uk.