VRO Schools Project

The Visual Reading Schools Project is a carefully designed research trial working with children between the ages of 7 and 18. The first phase involved coaching dyslexia specialists so that they could become approved Visual Reading coaches. 24 specialist teachers completed this phase by August 2026. A further 8 are part way through. The Visual Reading coaches will deliver structured sessions and record progress. Most of the coaches will be working face-to-face, although a few will be working remotely. The coaches themselves are already benefitting from the Visual Reading project. The mean reading speed of the 24 coaches at the beginning of the project was 240 wpm (median 232 wpm). By the end it was 583 wpm (median 529 wpm). At the same time they recalled 2.5 times as many points from a page of text. Having a personal experience of the shift from a verbal to a visual understanding is important for coaches prior to working with students. Similarly, the experience of improving both reading speed and comprehension/recall provides them with confidence that their students can too. This page explains what the project involves and shows live, anonymised summary results from the data coaches are recording. Individual children and coaches are never identified here.

Coaches will meet with children once a week. The initial meeting explains and models the process. The follow up sessions are designed to monitor progress. Children are asked to preview a page, and then read with the overlay and their finger. The reading speed is recorded and children are asked to recall what they have read. They are then asked to review the page. The number of points finally recalled is recorded, although we are primarily interested in the ratio between the initial and final number of points. Children are expected to practice daily for 10 minutes a day. Individual coaches will decide how best to support this practice. After the 6 sessions are completed, coaches will make a judgment about how well the child has been practicing as an additional confounding variable. Participants are organised into an intervention and a control group. These have been labelled as Group A and Group B without any indication about which is which. On this public page, until the research project is completed, we only ever refer to groups in that blinded way — we do not label which group received which overlays. The intervention group receives coaching about metacognitive reading strategies and the use of our Structured Saccade Overlays. The control group receive the same coaching but work with coloured overlays (intended as placebo). Both groups are expected to gain access to the Structured Saccade Overlays if it proves more effective than the coloured overlays. The charts below update from the same research records coaches enter in the secure dashboard. Only aggregated figures are shown: how many coaches and children are taking part, and how group averages change over time.