Research School Network: 3 EEF Resources for the Early Years A summary of some of the places for early years staff looking for evidence

In this post we explore the Education Endowment Foundation website to share 3 resources that we think are incredibly useful for Early Years practitioners.

The Early Years Toolkit
Although smaller than its Primary and Secondary equivalent, the Early Years Toolkit is just as useful. It features summaries of 12 approaches for early years teaching, from Play-based Learning to Parental Engagement. For each approach, the EEF assign a cost, an evidence security rating and an impact in months of progress.

Each section has a useful detailed summary of how this rating was arrived at, and the recommendations for effective and less successful approaches. We always recommend reading this, and delving deeper than those headlines because, as they state, ​“There is some variation between approaches, which suggests that the choice of approach and the way in which strategies are introduced are important.”

Preparing for Literacy Guidance Report

The Preparing for Literacy guidance report focuses on the teaching of communication, language and literacy to children between the ages of 3 and 5, although it can be used to support older pupils who have fallen behind their peers. The report gives 7 recommendations and supports with practical suggestions for how these can be applied. The recommendations are:
1) Prioritise the development of communication and language
2) Develop children’s early reading using a balanced approach
3) Develop children’s capability and motivation to write
4) Embed opportunities to develop self-regulation
5) Support parents to understand how to help their children learn
6) Use high quality assessment to ensure all children make good progress
7) Use high quality targeted support to help struggling children

Sir Kevan Collins, in the introduction to the guidance, states:

Aidan Severs has written about the report in our blog here.

Early Language Development: Needs, provision, and intervention for preschool children from socioeconomically disadvantaged backgrounds

This report was written for the Education Endowment Foundation by Law, Charlton, Dockrell, Gascoigne, McKean and Theakston in 2017. Coming in at 206 pages including appendices, this is not quite as easily digestible as the guidance report. However, it is a massively comprehensive document which has ​“the specific objectives of highlighting interventions that have the greatest potential to improve children’s life chances, reduce inequalities in outcomes, and potentially inform further rounds of research funded by the EEF.”

The report asks four key questions:

• What do we know about typical language development?
• What do we know about current levels of need?
• Is it possible to identify promising practices and programmes designed to improve children’s language skills in the early years?
• To what extent is it possible to map those interventions onto existing services

We would certainly recommend this as a review for those who lead on this in early years settings.

See also:

Improving Mathematics in the Early Years and Key Stage 1

Improving Social and Emotional Learning in Primary Schools