My previous post discussed the critical need for the establishment of MTSS if the needs of all students is to be met. I strongly believe that it is not possible to talk about MTSS without making reference to RTI – Response to Intervention. RTI was developed as an approach to identify and support students through a series of universal screenings that would then allow for the implementation of appropriate interventions aligned to student needs. While MTSS looks at how the support is structured, RTI focuses on the fidelity of the tiers of targeted supports to ensure outcomes can be ensured in a reasonable amount of time. . The RTI approach calls for the adoption of high quality intervention programmes, progress monitoring and increasingly intensive tiers of intervention with fidelity to its implementation (Otaiba et al 2014).
While RTI was established more in the context of reading and disabilities, I took it on as part of the whole school intervention cycle to ensure that students got the interventions they required while ensuring that this did not end up being a barrier to their engagement with curriculum and a crutch that held them back.
I believe that the priority in education is to ensure students are all able to access the curriculum with their aged peers. When we acknowledge that all students are different and come into school with different abilities, strengths and experiences, we can understand that teaching is not simply about delivering content. Education is about ensuring students learn. And students learn when teachers understand that their students have varied needs that must be met. If not all students at any time share the same prior knowledge, expertise, skills or educational experiences, there will need to be a way to level the playing field for every child.
The RTI approach moves away from simply providing support with “arbitrary discrepany criteria” (Haager 2007) to ensuring processes that are more stringent in nature are used to identify how students are responding to the interventions, and what their next steps might be. My firm belief in the importance of adopting an RTI approach was cemented when I saw how easily teachers could get caught up in the emotional toil of working with refugees in school in an intensive language setting. When the narrative was whether we should keep them in a separate intervention class “for just another term … or two” because staff weren’t sure the students could “survive” the reality check of being with peers and non specialist teachers in the mainstream classroom, I recognised we were beginning to lose the plot. The sole determiner in measuring the growth of a students ability and ability to access age appropriate curriculum with their peers, must be with the use of data collected through an RTI approach.
There is a great deal of research that has identified what Haager (2007) points out in her research article – a disproportionate number of language learners are identified for special education. We need to be careful when using screening tools that were not developed with the language learner in mind. It is also critical that intervention programmes are put in place to fit the purpose. Finally, I contend it is critical that intervention cycles are short and targeted, ensuring that students do not lose out the opportunity to work with their age appropriate curriculum.
References
Haager, D. (2007). Promises and Cautions Regarding Using Response to Intervention with English Language Learners. Learning Disability Quarterly, 30(3), 213-218.
Otaiba, S. A., Wagner, R. K., & Miller , B. (2014). “Waiting to Fail” Redux: Understandng Inadequate Response to Intervention. Learning Disability Quarterly, 37(3), 129-133
Wilson, B. (Sept 2025). The Impact of a Multi-Tiered System of Supports with Academic Tiered Intervention at the High School Level. (Unpublished Doctoral Dissertation) Retrieved September 2026
Assisting Students Struggling with Reading: Response to Intervention (Rti) and Multi-Tier Intervention in the Primary Grades. https://ies.ed.gov/ncee/wwc/practiceguide/3 Accessed on 16/09/2026
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