The unique child: tailoring personalised support in the early years

The EEF’s guide to the Early Years Pupil Premium recommends that settings should ‘tailor personalised support’.

What does this mean, and how can settings use this approach to help every child flourish?

The Statutory Framework for the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) includes a commitment to the ‘unique child’. This commitment is partly about recognising the individuality of each child. Children develop at different rates and in different ways. As educators, we will be constantly adapting our ways of interacting with each child, teaching and caring for them. Relationships which draw on this deep knowledge of the children is at the heart of effective early education and childcare.

When the EEF recommends that we should ‘tailor personalised support’ for children, this includes the EYFS principle of the ‘unique child’. However, the recommendation also goes beyond this principle. It highlights the importance of our work to identify which children need extra support and teaching, in order to make good progress.

Each child who is eligible for the Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) has their own learning strengths and needs.

However, we also know that on average, children who are socio-economically disadvantaged are more likely to have delayed development in key areas. For example, Law et al. (2017) highlight that disadvantaged children are at a higher risk of delayed language development, which can have long-term effects on their education and life outcomes.

There are still significant evidence gaps with respect to children under the age of 4 (before they start reception). For example, we don't yet have robust research evidence about programmes which boost children's outcomes in key areas like communication and language, and also narrow the learning gap between disadvantaged children and their peers.

However, EEF are working with the Stronger Practice Hubs across England to study the impact of new programmes on children's outcomes, and their influence on developing quality practice.

In the meantime, we can still take informed action by usefully drawing on research evidence to help us with the task of making accurate assessments. For example, the LanguageScreen assessment tool is part of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI), which has been extensively trialled by the EEF. You can use LanguageScreen with children age three and upwards for accurate assessment of expressive vocabulary, listening comprehension, receptive vocabulary and sentence repetition.

By identifying children with greater needs in their language development, you can accurately target them for more small-group or 1:1 opportunities for conversation. This extra support will help them to flourish.

Interactive reading is an example of an approach which you might use. However, it is important to note that tailoring personalised support means using your EYPP funding to offer more frequent support to the children with greater needs.

For example, if we offered all the children the same number of interactive reading sessions, we would not narrow the learning gap between disadvantaged children and their peers at all.

That’s why it’s an effective use of EYPP funding to:

• Use a robust assessment tool to identify the eligible children with the greatest needs in their communication and language

• Offer those children tailored, personalised support that’s additional and on-top of what you generally offer

• Monitor the children’s progress closely, using the assessment tool, so you can check that the approach is working.

By using this strategy, we can begin to bridge the gap between research evidence and our practice and ensure that every child thrives in the early years.  

The EEF Guide to the Early Years Pupil Premium (2025)

Law, J., Charlton, J., Dockrell, J., Gascoigne, M., McKean, C. and Theakston, A., 2017. Early Language Development: Needs, provision, and intervention for preschool children from socio-economically disadvantaged backgrounds