This report by the Education Endowment Foundation looks at the flagship programme from the government’s early years COVID-19 recovery strategy. The national scale-up of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) aimed to accelerate young children’s language and communication skills, in order to reverse the damaging impact had by successive lockdowns across England.
Almost 11,000 schools – or two-thirds of state-funded schools in England with reception pupils – took part in a government-funded roll-out of a programme to support four- and five-year-olds who would benefit from additional support with their language skills, across two school years (2020-21 and 2021-22).
The evaluation of the NELI programme shows that the intervention was well-received by the sector, with participating schools reporting that NELI benefited their pupils’ oral language skills and confidence with using language.
New long-term analysis from a previous EEF trial of the programme shows that NELI has proven to have a sustained positive impact on young children’s oral language, early word reading and reading comprehension beyond the initial intervention. These findings also indicate that the intervention particularly benefits children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds.
Year 1 findings suggest that despite the speed and scale at which NELI was rolled out and the fact that it occurred in a COVID-19 affected environment, training of school staff largely progressed as intended and school delivery of the programme to pupils was close to what was described in the logic model. The main adaptation for NELI implemented at scale was delivering NELI training online rather than face-to-face. This worked well and most school staff felt well prepared to deliver NELI after completing the training.