Home » Vocabulary Mastery

Vocabulary Mastery

This Education Endowment Foundation funded trial is designed to test the impact of Vocabulary Mastery for GCSE English Resit. It is a 12-week targeted intervention to develop the tier two vocabulary of GCSE English resit learners to improve English resit outcomes. This aims to break the resit cycle and advance the vocabulary of the most disadvantaged and open increased opportunities.

What is Vocabulary Mastery for GCSE Resit?

Vocabulary Mastery for GCSE English Resit is a 12-week, targeted programme which aims to support learners working towards a grade 4 in GCSE English resits, by developing their understanding and application of Tier 2 vocabulary (defined as words with high frequency in written texts, such as ‘parallel’, ‘dispersed’, ‘adjacent’). The aim is to help learners to develop and use new vocabulary and also to support the decoding of unfamiliar words by exploring the building blocks of words. The intervention has been developed from a maths mastery approach.

Learners will be invited to attend a 60-minute, small group workshop alongside their usual GCSE English classes each week. Workshops will be delivered by specialist English teachers within participating colleges, who will be trained and supported throughout the programme.

Who is leading this project?

Sally Schofield and Laura Billington at East Lancashire Learning Group (ELLG), a Further Education provider in East Lancashire are leading this project. ELLG is one of six EEF 16–19 Evidence Partnership colleges and will work with three other colleges (hub leads) to co-deliver the programme.

What will this project look like in your setting?

Teachers will deliver two, 12-week cycles of the programme: one in the autumn term and one in the spring term. In each cycle, colleges will run two workshop groups with four to eight learners per group. This means that each setting will run four workshop groups over the academic year.

This evaluation is a randomised controlled trial, meaning that learners within settings (college campuses) will be randomly allocated to be invited to attend the workshops as well as their normal classes (intervention group) or will only attend their normal GCSE resit classes (control group).

As this is a research evaluation, colleges participating in the trial will be asked to complete some evaluation activities throughout the project. Exact evaluation activities will be set out in the information materials if you express an interest in this project. Settings will receive £1000 for completing all evaluation activities, and up to £480 is available (per setting) for teacher cover required to allow teachers to attend the in-person training.

One in-person training session

Three online twilight webinars

Access to a full suite of resources for delivering the intervention

Access to online drop-in sessions to seek additional support if required

Who can take part?

To participate, settings must meet the following criteria:

We achieve this by:

Campus of a state-funded FEC or SFC in England
Offer GCSE English resits as part of full-time courses to 16-19-year-old learners
Have a minimum of 64, 16-19-year-old GCSE English resit learners enrolled on a full-time study programme for the 2026/27 academic year
In the 50% most deprived areas of England as defined by the Income Deprivation Affecting Children Index (IDACI)
Have not previously participated in the VM ESPD and incorporated the VM approach into the standard GCSE English resit curriculum
Not taking part in the STEER Tracking to Support 16+ Transition EEF pilot evaluation
Not currently using the Lexonik literacy intervention as part of your GCSE English resit course in Academic year 25 / 26 and not intending to use it during Academic year 26 27 (settings that have used Lexonik in the past but are no longer using it may participate in this study).

Register your Interest

Vocabulary Mastery Form

First Name

Last Name

Your college setting

Job title

Where did you hear about the trial?

I consent for my details to be shared with the organisations running the programme

Yes

College locations that meet IDACI eligibility

For details on how we use the personal information you provide on this form, please visit our privacy policy and the project specific privacy notice.

A further email will be sent to you after filling out this expression of interest form.

Why we qualified for EEF funding?

This evaluation aims to fill an evidence gap in a much-needed area of support for colleges. GCSE English resit results have seen a drop in the pass rate in recent years, and this continued in 2024 with 21% of learners passing, compared with 26% the previous year.

The Vocabulary Mastery programme was previously developed through an EEF early-stage programme development (ESPD) project. As part of this process, the programme was delivered in 11 college settings, receiving positive feedback from teachers on the perceived usefulness of the programme. All settings reported that they intended to embed the programme into ongoing delivery and would recommend it to other settings. The EEF are interested in funding this efficacy trial to test the programme’s impact and scalability in a larger number of colleges, via an independent evaluation.

The approach is well-aligned with recommendations from the EEF’s secondary literacy guidance report: providing explicit vocabulary instruction, focusing on morphology to help learners make connections between words, and prioritising teaching of tier 2 vocabulary (EEF, 2018).

How are we evaluating it?

The project will be evaluated by The Policy Institute at King’s College London using a randomised controlled trial. The evaluation will be an efficacy trial meaning it will test the impact of Vocabulary Mastery under developer-led conditions.

All learners in a setting will have the same chance of being allocated to the intervention group (receiving the Vocabulary Mastery programme). Learners allocated to the control group will continue with business as usual and not receive the Vocabulary Mastery programme.

An implementation and process evaluation will be conducted alongside the impact evaluation to explore how settings implement and perceive the programme. It will also assess whether tier 2 vocabulary improves for learners in the intervention group.

What is the timeline for this project?

Delivery is taking place in the 2026/27 academic year, and the evaluation report will be published in Spring 2029.