“We’ve now got more evidence than ever as to what works to support children before they start school,” says Professor Becky Francis, chief executive of the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF).
“Using that evidence can help create great learning opportunities for all children, particularly those from socially disadvantaged backgrounds.”
Francis is speaking as the EEF is cranking up its focus on research into “what works” in early years settings, as evidence stacks up about how this stage can influence future academic attainment and help close the disadvantage gap.
Indeed, a recent data analysis from the Department for Education and Durham University suggested that children who attended Reception classes with the most effective teachers had higher lifetime earnings than those who didn’t.
Exactly what makes “effective” early years teaching is still up for debate, though - and that’s why it’s so important to build up the evidence base further.
“Early years settings are under considerable financial pressure, so evidence can be a useful tool about how to maximise resources and use those resources most effectively,” says Francis.
As well as suggesting interventions that may be effective, she adds that research can also “weed out” those that aren’t.
It is often surprising, she says, that interventions with “very strong hypotheses” sometimes don’t live up to expectations - or are even proven to be detrimental to learning.
And while research will never hold all the answers, Francis points out that it has an important role to play in raising the status of the profession and potentially improving the quality of recruits to early years settings.
“We want early years practice to be taken seriously and given the status it deserves and, actually, having a robust evidence base is a crucial part of that,” she says.
There is, however, a lot of work still to do here: much research in early years was carried out in the USA and there are “a lot of gaps in the literature”, says Francis. That’s why the EEF will be extending its programme of trials in early years settings in England, to help fill some of these gaps.
Today, the EEF updated its Early Years Toolkit, a review of what hundreds of pieces of international research say about different types of interventions in early years.
It doesn’t provide easy answers to what works but helps practitioners see what approaches might be worth trying by rating their cost, impact and the solidity of their research base.
The update provides more evidence on when and how to implement different approaches and a new section on supporting disadvantaged children. It’s also accompanied by the launch of the EEF’s new Early Years Evidence Store, which provides videos of specific interventions taking place in real-life early years settings, to support implementation.
EEF’s Early Years Toolkit: four takeaways
So, when it comes to effective early years provision, what do we know so far about what that looks like?
Here are some key takeaways from the toolkit:
1. Early language provision should be a key area of focus
The number of Year 1 pupils in England needing speech and language support at school rose by 10 per cent over the past year, according to a recent analysis by the BBC.
These pupils started Reception after the first lockdown and experienced significant disruption to this stage of their schooling.
So it is perhaps no surprise that speech and language development has been named as a priority area in the post-Covid recovery programme.
Thankfully, the Early Years Toolkit demonstrates that the evidence is strong for numerous approaches that focus on this area. They have one of the highest “impact” ratings and tend to be low cost.
These approaches can increase children’s learning by seven months, according to the EEF.
For example, a 2016 randomised controlled trial found a positive impact of four months’ additional progress for the Nuffield Early Language Intervention - a programme designed to improve the spoken language ability of children during the transition from nursery to primary school.
The toolkit also picks out interactive reading as a key area: “There is consistent evidence that reading to young children and encouraging them to answer questions and talk about the story with a trained adult is an effective approach.”
It also recommends that settings should use “a range of different approaches to developing communication and language skills”, as it is “unlikely that one approach alone is enough to secure young children’s development and progress”.
Ensuring staff are properly trained is vital too, it says, as well as ensuring that a child’s spoken language is linked to the development of their reading and writing skills.
Jonathan Kay, head of evidence synthesis at the EEF, adds that “using shared book reading as a basis for explicit vocabulary instruction is used quite frequently and that has had really large effect sizes in a couple of studies”.
2. Not all early numeracy interventions are created equal
Early numeracy interventions have also been shown by researchers to have a high impact and a strong evidence base.
But the Early Years Toolkit stresses that some can be more effective than others.
Nicola Cherry, an experienced early years teacher who helps the EEF create examples of how approaches can be implemented, says that taking in the full breadth of the maths curriculum and concentrating on “concepts and language” - such as size, shape and pattern - works best.
“When interventions focused on numerical operations, impacts were lower,” she adds.
The regularity of numeracy in early years was also found to be important, says Kay. “It’s not about it being a one-off add-on, but making sure that it is happening multiple times a week and that children are having that early numeracy instruction.”
He adds that, in numeracy, professional development was “one of the biggest moderators of impact”.
“It’s not just knowing there is a practice that we should do and we should repeat, but understanding the way that children’s knowledge of maths develops,” he says.
“It’s all very well if everyone’s amazing at counting, but not if you’re not able to track the next step building on that foundational knowledge in numeracy.”
Cherry agrees, adding that the most effective early numeracy approaches tend to “balance guided interaction with both direct teaching and child-led activities, depending on the age and capabilities of the child”.
3. Parental engagement may count for more than extra time in school
Research has looked at whether starting early years education sooner or spending longer hours in an early years setting can improve attainment.
While some studies find positive outcomes - including the well-known Effective Provision of Pre-School Education study in the UK - the costs of both are high compared to other interventions.
Starting early years education early has a “moderate” impact, according to the toolkit, giving children a three-month advantage in terms of learning outcomes.
A cheaper option, the research suggests, might be focusing on parental engagement strategies - many of which focus on shared reading in the home environment.
On average, these approaches can have an impact of an additional five months’ progress, although interventions that targeted particular families or outcomes were the most effective overall.
“This is an area where the evidence is a lot stronger,” says Kay. “There’s a really strong evidence basis for the importance and the efficacy of strategies that engage parents…There’s a real variety and fairly consistent results all over the world and that positive effect is prominent across all of them.”
4. Play is crucial
The importance of play for young children’s overall development is not disputed, but the strength of the evidence for “play-based learning” leading to cognitive outcomes is quite weak and largely focuses on guided play.
“There are only two studies of free play and they are in direct contradiction,” says Kay. “One has an extremely positive effect and one has a negative effect, so it’s clear there’s something around the importance of implementation, around planning, around the environments you create for play and how you balance that child-initiated play with structured activities.”
But while there may not yet be a solid proven link between something like free play and academic outcomes, play has been shown to improve learning.
“They found that when interventions for early language or early numeracy were delivered alongside or as part of a play-based context, then you got better outcomes,” says Louise Jackson, an experienced teacher creating online real-world examples of the interventions for the EEF.
Because of this, Kay thinks that rather than arguing over whether or not play leads directly to learning, we should be making the case for practitioners to think more deeply about how to maximise learning opportunities within the context of children’s natural play.
“Rather than going, ‘There’s no evidence for or there’s good evidence for play’, it’s better to think about what is it that we’re trying to achieve in the early years setting and how might those more free peer-to-peer or play-based interactions lead to the development of that?” he says.
