The quality of systematic reviews of effectiveness in literacy learning in English: a 'tertiary' review

Recent governments in the United Kingdom have introduced a number of initiatives aimed at improving the literacy levels of children. Policy and practice should be informed by rigorous evidence, and this evidence should be subjected to critical scrutiny. In the present paper the results of a ‘tertiary’ review of systematic reviews in literacy learning are presented. The methods, results and conclusions of 14 systematic reviews, containing meta‐analyses and meeting all the inclusion criteria for the tertiary review, are presented. The quality of the reviews, appraised using an adaptation of the Quality of Reporting of Meta‐analyses statement, is discussed. Overall the quality of the meta‐analyses included in this tertiary review was good; all reviews clearly stated their research question, and their methods of searching for and selecting included studies; most described their data extraction and used some form of quality assessment of included studies. However, six reviews did not make an assessment of publication bias, which is potentially a major threat to the validity of any systematic review. A number of reviews in this tertiary review are judged to be of sufficiently high quality in order to provide reliable evidence for the effectiveness of literacy interventions.