Nursery World - Early years language training boosts children's skills

An early years speech, language and communication training programme has been shown to speed up children’s development by five months, an independent evaluation has found.

Talking Matters was developed by speech and language training company Elklan and run in 128 early years settings in six local authority areas in England between 2015-16. The evaluation was carried out by the University of Sheffield in 13 settings in the Isle of Wight, Windsor and Maidenhead, Lancashire, and Barnet.

Children who received Talking Matters support between the ages of 16 and 35 months progressed by an average of seven months in their language development, while children in the control group progressed by just two months, the evaluation found. Improvements were recorded in both the children’s receptive language, or ability to understand, and their expressive language, or ability to use and combine words.

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