Bob Rutherford, Renfrewshire council's principal psychologist, said the evaluation of the Renfrewshire Early Intervention Language Project showed that children are making statistically significant progress in the development of reading skills. The more intervention the 2,000 children in the study received, the greater their achievements.
Knowledge of letters was found to be the biggest single predictor of future reading success, followed by understanding the concept of print, word matching, awareness of beginning and end sounds of words, auditory discrimination and expressive language skills.
Mr Rutherford said, 'Baseline assessment has also confirmed what is intuitively known by all early years staff - that there is a huge variation in emerging literacy skills on entry to P1.
'Pupils from schools serving more socially and economically deprived areas had significantly lower language skills than others, while in terms of gender, boys entered school with poorer pre-reading skills than girls.' Renfrewshire council held a series of three conferences last month on 'Raising the Achievement of Boys', which involved more than 2,000 teachers and support staff. Education consultant Chris Dickinson addressed the conferences and explained how boys can benefit from new teaching techniques and approaches. These include encouraging children to play a musical instrument, which has been found to help reading ability, and adapting teaching for different styles of learning, such as kinaesthetic learners who find action and movement helps.
Shelagh Rae, Renfrewshire's director of education and leisure services, said, 'This strategy is about raising awareness of what we can do to help boys achieve more. This means involving parents as well as teachers and addressing the cultural influences which may hinder boys from doing their best. At the same time it's important to remember that not all boys do badly and not all girls do well; this strategy is part of our overall aim of helping all children get more out of education.'