The Education Endowment Foundation has welcomed today’s announcement by the Department for Education that it is to make Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) – one of the EEF’s Promising Projects – available to state-funded primary schools at no cost. This will be funded as part of the Government’s £350m allocation to tutoring, through the £1bn Covid-19 ‘catch-up’ package announced in June 2020.
The NELI programme supports the language and early literacy skills of Reception pupils through additional targeted support provided by trained early years staff. Initially funded by the Nuffield Foundation, the EEF has since funded two randomised controlled trials testing its impact – the most recent found that children receiving the NELI programme made the equivalent of +3 additional months’ progress in oral language skills, on average, compared to children who did not receive NELI.
As a result, NELI is listed as one of the EEF’s Promising Projects. We are currently supporting a development pilot of an online training model to enable NELI to be delivered at scale. This has been made possible thanks to the financial support of ICG, which is supporting the EEF to scale up our Promising Projects.
Professor Becky Francis, Chief Executive of the EEF, commented: