Learning Links is proud to announce that the organisation has been selected as a recipient of a $300,000 grant from the Paul Ramsay Foundation (PRF) as part of their Experimental Evaluation Open Grant Round. This generous funding will allow our Psychology team to evaluate the Reading for Life® program and contribute to the growing body of evidence supporting effective literacy interventions for children facing reading difficulties.
Support for Social Impact Programs
PRF has committed $2.1 million in funding to seven Australian charities, enabling them to evaluate innovative programs and improve outcomes for children, young people, families, and individuals experiencing disadvantage. We are deeply grateful for PRF’s support and their commitment to building a strong evidence base for programs that seek to drive meaningful social impact. We are extremely proud to be one of the seven chosen Australian charities for this grant.
Dr. George Argyrous, PRF’s Head of Measurement, Evaluation, Research, and Learning, stated:
“Through this funding, PRF aims to deepen the understanding and experience of evaluation techniques in Australia to better measure and create social impact. These evaluations will contribute to the evidence base that will help shape future investment in social impact programs, not only benefiting the organisations themselves but also providing knowledge for the broader for-purpose sector.”
PRF and the grant recipients will be fortunate to receive support from the Australian Centre for Evaluation at various stages of the grant process.
Evaluation of the Reading for Life® Program
Learning Links has been supporting children who have difficulties with learning since 1972, and has a deep commitment to providing a range of best-practice, evidence-based programs that focus on literacy and numeracy, early childhood development, communication, mental health and overall wellbeing.
As part of this commitment, we have been running the 15-week Reading for Life® literacy intervention program for over 20 years. It was developed by a psychologist, teacher, and speech pathologist to support Year 2 and 3 students experiencing reading difficulties, and focuses on strengthening essential foundational literacy skills such as reading fluency and comprehension while fostering a positive self-concept and motivation toward reading. Using structured, engaging, and research-based strategies, reading buddies are trained to deliver the Reading for Life® sessions to help children build confidence in their reading abilities. The program has been enhanced over the past year to address the latest evidence around reading interventions and the use of a systematic synthetic phonics approach.
With the PRF funding, Learning Links will conduct a rigorous evaluation of the updated program, in collaboration with the University of Western Sydney, through a randomised control trial involving 180 students from schools across Sydney and New South Wales. Participants will be selected in partnership with each school, with pre-testing taking place before the program begins, and post-testing undertaken at the end of the 15-week program, and again at 3 and 12 months for both groups – plus an additional follow-up at 24 months select groups of students. Secondary data from NAPLAN reading results will also be analysed. This comprehensive study will assess improvements in reading fluency, comprehension, and long-term motivation to read.
Improving Vital Literacy Skills and Education Outcomes for Children
This evaluation is another step towards providing the most effective evidence-based programs for children in our schools facing ongoing difficulties with their learning, to help them catch up to their peers and build the skills they need for future success.
“We are deeply grateful to the Paul Ramsay Foundation for making this important evaluation possible. Their support not only benefits the children, families and schools we partner with, but also contributes valuable insights to the broader education sector. By investing in evidence-based evaluation, they help organisations like ours refine and strengthen programs, ultimately improving outcomes for children across Australia,” says Jill Reich, CEO of Learning Links.
We look forward to sharing the progress and outcomes of this evaluation in the coming months.