In a Year 4 classroom in England, two children sit shoulder to shoulder with a book they've chosen themselves. One reads aloud while the other listens, ready with gentle encouragement when a word trips them up. A few minutes later, they switch roles. No teaching assistant hovers nearby; no volunteer watches from the corner. These nine-year-olds are coaching each other through a story, and according to new research, that partnership is making them better readers.
The approach is called PALS-UK, an adaptation of Peer Assisted Learning Strategies originally developed at Vanderbilt University in the United States. Researchers spent several years testing and refining the program for use in UK primary schools, and their findings, published this spring following an evaluation led by Manchester Metropolitan University and funded by the Education Endowment Foundation, offer a striking example of how peer support can lift academic outcomes.
Across more than 100 English primary schools, pupils who took part in PALS-UK made an average of two months' additional progress in reading compared to children in schools that did not use the program. The gains came from a structured 20-week curriculum delivered three times a week in 35-minute sessions, built around four activities: partner reading with real-time correction, story retell, paragraph shrinking where children summarise passages in as few words as possible, and a prediction relay where they guess what happens next. Children are paired based on their reading levels, with each pair encouraged to select their own books, giving them genuine autonomy over what they read.
What makes PALS-UK particularly compelling is its cost-effectiveness. The program relies on teachers training their pupils to coach one another, rather than requiring additional staffing or expensive resources. Yet despite this simplicity, teachers reported that the structured nature of the sessions and the built-in support helped pupils practise both reading fluency and comprehension strategies simultaneously.
Not everything was straightforward. The research team adapted the original American program significantly for UK classrooms, removing an integrated points-and-competition system that didn't sit well with pupils and teachers. In its place, they introduced verbal praise and developed video resources to help educators understand both the evidence behind the approach and the practical mechanics of running it. The team also created guidance around diverse texts and book choice to help children develop personal investment in reading.
Some challenges remained. Both PALS-UK schools and control schools saw children's motivation to read decline over the study period, mirroring broader research on reading engagement as children move through primary school. But in a hopeful counterpoint, 55 percent of teachers said the program had strengthened a culture of reading for enjoyment in their classrooms. Pupils began talking about books with their friends outside of sessions. And children, it seems, discovered unexpected fun in the challenge of shrinking a paragraph to its bare bones.
The researchers acknowledge that the success of this UK adaptation depended on continuous feedback from teachers during the trialling process. That collaborative spirit, they suggest, may be the real engine behind the results: a program shaped not just by academics, but by the people who use it every day.