Nursery World - Covid recovery programme found to benefit children's language skills

A Government funded Covid recovery programme to provide additional support for four and five-year-olds with their language skills, has been found to benefit pupils years later.

The EEF has published a set of evaluations of the DfE Funded NELI programme

A series of newly published independent evaluations of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) find that the roll-out of the programme was ‘well managed and easy for schools to access’, while the benefits of taking part remained years later when children were six or seven.

NELI was offered to state-funded primary schools in 2020-21 and 2021-22. The Early Education Foundation (EEF) and Nuffield Foundation oversaw the roll-out of the first and second years of delivery. The University of Oxford managed the delivery of the programme.

Almost 11,000 schools – or two-thirds of state funded schools in England with Reception pupils – took part in the programme, which was developed by researchers at the Universities of Oxford, Sheffield and York. Under the programme, teaching assistants or early years educators were trained to deliver scripted individual and small-group language sessions to four-and five-year-olds identified as needing additional support over the course of 20 weeks.

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