Catch Up Literacy is a reading performance enhancement program for students ages 6 to 14 who have difficulty learning to read. It was initially developed in 1998 for children 6 to 8 years of age based on the research results of Diana Bentley, Suzi Clipson-Boyles and Dee Reid. Later, the programme was extended to young people up to 14 years of age, because dramatic gaps in their reading skills were evident in the youth population.

Through a wide range of accessible online books (8,000), the aim is to strengthen students’ abilities to combine phonemes (combine sounds of letters into words), segment phonemes (separate words into sounds of letters), and memorize particular words so that they can be understood without the need for phonetic strategies to decode them. The books have been divided into 12 levels of difficulty, so that each student, according to their initial and evolutionary performance, has access to a manual adapted to their needs.

The intervention consists of 4 stages:

1. i) Diagnosis of the initial abilities that serves to set goals according to the student’s reading experience.

(ii) Selection of books appropriate to their abilities and tastes.

(iii) Two reading aloud sessions per week.

(iv) Continuous monitoring of progress and related improvement strategies.

Reading aloud sessions are individual and supervised by a tutor (education assistant), who is responsible for monitoring the reader’s progress. These last 15 minutes which are divided into: preparation for reading (3min); the actual reading and discussion of the text (6min); and writing a summary (6min). Sessions are given for 30 weeks, after which the student takes a test to see whether or not he or she is still in the program. For a correct performance of the intervention, the Catch Up Foundation trains the teachers who train the tutors during 4 sessions of 60 to 90 minutes each. They are also given methodology manuals that summarize all the steps to be followed and the corresponding strategies. All those teachers are grouped in the Catch Up community, where they can access online support and discuss their doubts.