A relatively quick, face‐to‐face, adaptive working memory training intervention was assessed in 5‐ to 8‐year‐old typically developing children, randomly allocated to a 6‐week intervention condition, or an active control condition. All children received 18 sessions of 10 minutes, three times/week for 6 weeks. Assessments of six working memory skills, word reading and mathematics were administered at pre‐test, post‐test and 6‐month follow‐up. Additional measures of word reading, mathematics, spelling and reading comprehension were given at a 12‐month follow‐up. At post‐test, the trained group showed significantly larger gains than the control group on the two trained executive‐loaded working memory tasks (Listening Recall and Odd One Out Span) and on two untrained working memory tasks (Word Recall and Counting Recall). These ‘near transfer’ effects were still apparent at 6‐month follow‐up. ‘Far transfer’ effects were less evident: there was no difference between the groups in their gains on single word reading and mathematics over 12 months, and spelling skills did not differ at 12‐month follow‐up. However, the trained group showed significantly higher reading comprehension scores than the control group at 12‐month follow‐up. Thus, improving the ability to divide attention between processing and storage may have had specific benefits for reading comprehension. Copyright © 2013 John Wiley & Sons, Ltd.