Learning Language and Loving It™ – The Hanen Program® for Early Childhood Educators (Hanen LLLI) provides training for Early Years practitioners to promote language and early literacy. It provides practical strategies that can be woven into everyday activities to help children build language and social skills. Hanen LLLI was delivered by Communicate SLT CIC, a Blackpool-based organisation with experience of delivering Hanen programmes.
Following findings from the first Hanen LLLI trial (which was disrupted by COVID-19), the proposal was to provide half of the training workshops through live online webinars and three-quarters of the video feedback sessions via video call. This new schedule was piloted first, ahead of the trial.
There are therefore two streams of work within this project:
The Hanen LLLI programme delivered to around 15 state-maintained and PVI nursery settings in the Liverpool area between February 2022 and July 2022, to pilot the approach of the training having both online and face-to-face elements. You can find the report for this study published in 2023 here.
An efficacy trial of the Hanen LLLI programme in 150 state-maintained and PVI nursery settings between September 2022 and July 2023 across the 3 DfE Regional School Commissioner regions, ‘The North’, ‘East-Midlands and the Humber’ and ‘West-Midlands’ to look at the impact of the programme.
As part of the Department for Education’s Accelerator Fund, the EEF is commissioning a number of efficacy trials of programmes that show promise for increasing pupil attainment.
Hanen LLLI was recommended for further evaluation by a recent EEF-funded review of early language. It is well-informed by research on child development and early language. The EEF previously funded a trial of Hanen LLLI, but the training and evaluation were disrupted due to COVID-19. A report focusing on the implementation and process evaluation of the project is available here.
The EEF re-trialled the programme to establish the impact of the programme on children’s language skills and take lessons learned from the first implementation and process evaluation. The efficacy trial, conducted by NatCen Social Research, evaluated the impact of Hanen LLLI using a two-arm cluster randomised control trial. The randomisation was stratified by region and setting type (maintained vs PVI) to ensure settings from the same region, or with a similar type of provision, were evenly allocated to the treatment and control groups.
The study found that children in Hanen LLLI settings made the equivalent of 1 additional months’ progress in language development, on average, compared to children in other settings. These results have a moderate to high security rating. As with any study, there is statistical uncertainty regarding this impact consistent with small negative impacts or higher positive impacts.
Children in Hanen LLLI settings who were eligible for Early Years Pupil Premium (EYPP) made the equivalent of 1 additional months’ progress in language development as measured by BPVS‑3 scores, on average, compared to EYPP eligible children in other settings. Similarly, children in Hanen LLLI settings with lower initial language development made the equivalent of 1 additional months’ progress in language development as measured by the BPVS‑3 scores, on average, compared to children with lower initial language development in other settings. Similarly to the primary outcome, the evaluator was unable to conclude that these were genuine effects.
Overall, trained practitioners, Program Leaders, and nursery staff had positive perceptions of Hanen LLLI, even those not directly involved in the programme. The study also found that nursery practitioners showed improvements in their practices, including increased quantity and quality of interactions with children, and participants widely delivered the programme as intended. The amount of cascading varied across settings, but it was generally perceived as a beneficial method to increase the intervention’s impact on children, although implementing cascading consistently would require more structure and guidance.