Most staff who delivered the government’s £17 million early years language catch-up scheme for Reception children felt it was “beneficial for pupils’ development” - but many schools did not complete the programme.
The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) was offered to state-funded primary schools across the 2020-21 (cohort 1) and 2021-2022 (cohort 2) school years.
The Department for Education funded the rollout of NELI in order to help four- to five-year-old pupils affected by the pandemic catch up on speech, language and communication skills.
The scheme is a 20-week intervention that is usually delivered by a specially trained teaching assistant, involving both scripted individual and small-group language teaching sessions.
Today, an evaluation of the first two years of the rollout, published by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), reveals the impact of the programme, which reached around 11,000 primary schools across England.
While the EEF was positive about both the impact and long-term benefit for those who received the programme, disruption owing to Covid across both years meant that many schools did not complete it. Almost one in 10 Year 1 staff (8 per cent) did not start it by the end of the first academic year.
And around half of cohort 2 schools surveyed (those who started receiving NELI in Reception in 2021-22) completed the full 20 weeks during the second year.
The EEF concluded that schools that had completed the full NELI programme or were delivering individual or group sessions with “fidelity” were more likely to observe a positive impact on pupils’ language abilities.
While schools did not face national closures in the second year of the NELI rollout, the EEF found that the “impact of Covid-19 was arguably no less severe” and absences linked to the virus “limited staff time and capacity” and “presented major barriers” to delivery.
These absences exacerbated a lack of staff capacity that was a “key barrier to effective delivery”.
Half of the staff surveyed from cohort 2 schools where the programme had not been delivered in full (105 out of 206) indicated that “disruption related to Covid-19 was a reason for their school not completing NELI delivery”.
The EEF also carried out school staff surveys in order to gauge feedback on the intervention, with many staff reporting concerns about capacity in delivering the NELI intervention.
In a survey of 868 school staff in cohort 2, carried out in December 2021, 177 reported that their school had concerns about the programme.
Of the 177, 90 per cent said they had concerns around the time requirements associated with delivery of the scheme, while more than three quarters (77 per cent) said they were concerned about the time requirements involved in setting up NELI.
And almost half (49 per cent) had concerns about a lack of staff capacity to undertake the online training and deliver the intervention.
The impact of NELI two years on
The EEF has also published a third report today, looking at the impact of NELI two years later, exploring the effects on reading.
It reports that the scheme had a positive impact in some areas, adding an estimated two months of progress across early word reading, reading comprehension, reading fluency and early language.
It also had a “larger effect of NELI on language for FSM-eligible pupils compared to non FSM-eligible pupils”, although the EEF has said this finding should be “interpreted with caution” due to data limitations.
Research commissioned by the EEF and published in May last year found that four- and five-year-olds were less likely to meet expected levels of development in 2021 than before the pandemic.
Overall, Covid pandemic disruption resulted in three extra early years children per class not reaching the expected development standards for their age group during the year.
Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Bedhampton, said that while her school noticed many benefits outlined in the report such as “improved oral language and comprehension”, and found it to be ”very successful at building children’s confidence”, there were some problems.
Ms Pinnington said that while all the training and resources for NELI are provided, ”there is no additional help with funding for the delivery”.
She also added that the “biggest issue is the time and adults needed each week to commit to the programme and needing to sustain this over time”.
“Where staffing and budgets are already stretched and no extra means to fund NELI, it is a case of compromising something else.”
Megan Dixon, a primary and early years specialist, said that it was “surprising that some of the challenges identified by these reports - such as the need for clear communications about the time commitments and capacity required to use the intervention effectively - were not anticipated by the teams involved”.
Ms Dixon said that this “highlights the importance of close collaboration and co-construction of interventions with schools and practitioners”.
Professor Becky Francis CBE, chief executive of the EEF, said it was “terrific that so many schools in England were able to take up the offer of the NELI programme, as part of the Department for Education’s recovery efforts”.
Professor Francis added that there was “robust evidence” to show that NELI is “effective in supporting children’s communication and language skills and today’s new findings suggest that the positive benefits for children are still seen later in primary school”.
“Today’s reports give us a great example of how evidence can be successfully scaled and mobilised to address a real and pressing need. The success of the rollout is also testament to the power of collaboration, with many different organisations contributing.”
The catch-up scheme was delivered across the 2020-21 and 2021-22 academic years. No further funding to extend the programme has been announced by the government.
