Interactive reading found to boost early language development by seven months

The Education Endowment Foundation’s updated Early Years Toolkit, which summarises findings from the ‘best available’ international evidence, shows that interactive reading and teaching and modelling vocabulary can have a ‘very high impact’ of up to seven months on children’s learning, for a ‘very low cost’.

Of the ten topics included in the Toolkit, each is accompanied by an ‘average impact’ in months progress, alongside information on cost and strength of the evidence base. Parental engagement, for example, can boost children’s learning by an average of five months and giving children extra hours of early years provision can help them progress by up to three months.

Examples of interactive reading strategies cited in the new Early Years Evidence Store, which was launched alongside the toolkit to illustrate how to put the approaches into practice in early years settings, include encouraging young children to ‘think about what happens next’, or to ‘relate stories to their own experiences’. Vocabulary strategies include explicitly labelling the different parts of an object – such as a flower – and encouraging young children to repeat the different words.  

The new resources, developed to support the Department for Education’s (DfE) Stronger Practice Hubs, are designed to support early years professionals to improve learning outcomes for their children, particularly those from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds. They also mark the EEF’s increased focus on early years education and the crucial role it plays in combatting education inequality.

Pre-pandemic studies estimate that the attainment gap between socio-economically disadvantaged five-year-olds and their classmates was around 4.6 months in 2019. Research by the EEF found that there were, on average, three more children per class not reaching the expected levels of development by the end of reception class in 2021, when compared to pre-pandemic levels.

'We want early years professionals to feel empowered to use education evidence to their advantage.' 

Professor Becky Francis CBE, chief executive of the EEF, said, ‘Giving every child access to great learning and development opportunities in the early years is absolutely crucial to making sure they achieve their potential. Early years professionals play a central role in this mission. But, with the sector facing a number of immediate challenges, they shoulder a huge amount of responsibility in their day-to-day working lives.’

She added, ‘We want early years professionals to feel empowered to use education evidence to their advantage, so that they can make informed choices about the strategies they adopt in their practice.

Commenting on the launch of the resources, Dr Lesley Curtis, headteacher at Everton Nursery School and Family Centre, said, ‘We constantly use education research to inform and improve our practice. It provides opportunities for all staff to reflect and question their practice at a deeper level. This in turn impacts on the life chances of young children through having high quality reflective educators.’