The 20-week programme consists of two 15-minute individual sessions and three 30-minute small group sessions each week, delivered to the three to six pupils with the weakest language skills in each classroom.
The sessions focus on improving pupil’s vocabulary, active listening, and narrative skills and in the second ten weeks include a small additional element (three minutes) focusing on developing phonological awareness and letter – sound knowledge.
The EEF has funded 5 projects related to NELI‑R:
1. Efficacy trial,
2. Effectiveness trial with longitudinal follow up,
3. Adaption of the training to an asynchronous online model,
4. Scale-up process evaluation, and,
5. Scale-up impact evaluation
Each impact evaluation has consistently shown that the children who received the programme made additional progress in their oral language skills than those who did not receive NELI‑R. The projects and some of their key findings are briefly described below, with links provided to each individual project webpage to access more information including the published reports.
Following positive findings from a pilot-trial of NELI funded by the Nuffield Foundation, EEF funded an efficacy trial of the programme in 15 schools. The trial, published in February 2016, studied two versions of the programme a 20-week version delivered to children in Reception and a 30-week version which began in Nursery and continued with children into their Reception year. The training was delivered in-person and led by the developers of the programme, therefore the evaluation tested the programme under ideal conditions.
The efficacy trial found at the end of programme delivery children who received the 30-week version made, on average, four months additional progress in their oral language skills, compared to those who did not receive NELI. The children who received the 20-week version made, on average, two months of additional progress in their oral language skills, compared to those who did not receive NELI. These result both have a high security rating: four out of five on the EEF padlock scale. The children were also assessed six months after the programme had finished and impacts on their language skills were still visible, however no reliable impact was found on their word reading skills.
The second trial of NELI tested a scalable version of the intervention, this time under everyday conditions and in 193 schools. Since the efficacy trial, a revised version of the 20-week reception programme had been published by the Oxford University Press and was used in this effectiveness trial. This published 20-week version of the programme consisted of two 15-minute individual sessions and three 30-minute small group sessions each week and was scalable to all schools. The children selected to participate in the trial were the five children in each classroom who obtained the lowest scores on a school-administered app-based assessment of oral language skills named LanguageScreen.
The independent evaluation, published in May 2020, found that children who received the NELI programme made the equivalent of three additional months’ additional progress in language skills, on average, compared to children who did not receive NELI. Children who received the NELI programme also made the equivalent of two additional months’ progress in early word reading, on average, compared to children who did not receive NELI, in addition to four additional months’ progress in language skills (as measured by the digital application LanguageScreen). This result has a very high security rating: five out of five on the EEF padlock scale. Moreover, surveys and interviews from the process evaluation showed that schools believed the training and ongoing support provided was clear, useful, and sufficiently detailed for them to deliver the intervention effectively.
Longitudinal follow-up of the children was commissioned to look at the programme’s impact on their language and reading skills over time. The assessments were planned for the end of Year 1 when the children were six or seven years old, however, due to partial school closures resulting from the COVID-19 pandemic, testing was implemented when the children were at the end of Year 2.
The report published in March 2023 showed, NELI‑R had a sustained influence on children’s oral language skills and early word reading and those who had received NELI‑R had higher scores in reading comprehension than those who did not receive the programme. A high rate of attrition (55.5% of pupils) due to the pandemic’s continued disruption to school life means the follow-up results should be treated as exploratory.
Following the positive findings of the effectiveness trial and emerging evidence that the disruption of the COVID-19 pandemic on children’s access to early education, was likely to influence their language development, the Department for Education in 2020 provided £9 million to offer NELI‑R to all schools with Reception pupils to support with education recovery.
The pandemic context required training and support to be accessible remotely in line with social distancing. The EEF, with additional financial support from ICG, provided funding to the University of Oxford to adapt the training resulting in an asynchronous online training and remote support model. The funding facilitated the new training approach being piloted in 46 schools before it was offered to schools as part of the national education recovery scale-up.
To support education recovery due the COVID-19 pandemic, the Department for Education provided £9 million and then £8 million to offer NELI‑R to all schools with Reception pupils in 2020/21 and 2021/22 academic year. In wave 1 (2020 – 21) over 6,500 schools across England registered to receive the intervention and wave 2 (2021 – 22) a further 4,297 schools registered to take part.
Two reports published in March 2023 evaluate the implementation of the national NELI-scale up, assessing and understanding the scaling process in a COVID-19 affected context, and providing recommendations for supporting future scale-up of educational interventions.
The first report, which focused on schools who signed up to receive NELI in 2020/21 – suggested that despite the speed and scale at which NELI was rolled out, as well as the challenges presented by COVID-19, staff training largely progressed as intended as did schools delivery of the programme to pupils up to July 2021. Schools that returned surveys indicated 70% intended to provide NELI‑R to their next cohort of Reception pupils.
The second report, looked at new schools who signed up to receive NELI in the 2021/22 academic year as well as schools in their second year of NELI‑R delivery. The findings highlighted that the ongoing impact of COVID-19 continued to influence how much of the programme schools were able to provide to pupils. Surveys highlighted, on average, schools delivered 10 of the 20 weeks of the programme by July 2022. NELI was perceived by school staff to be beneficial for pupils’ language development and confidence using language. This was particularly true of schools who had completed more of the NELI programme or were delivering the sessions with higher fidelity.
In September 2023, the impact evaluation of the NELI‑R national scale up was published. The study evaluated the impact of NELI‑R on children’s oral language skills in 356 schools who registered to receive the programme in 2021/22 and took part in the evaluation. The quasi-experimental Fuzzy Regression Discontinuity (FRD) design found children who received NELI‑R made the equivalent of four additional months’ progress in language skills, on average, compared to children who did not receive NELI. This finding has a moderate to high security rating: 3 out of 5 on the EEF padlock scale. On average, these schools delivered 11 weeks of the NELI programme to pupils. Exploratory subgroup analyses of the impact of the NELI‑R on language skills highlighted that pupils learning English as an Additional Language equally benefited from the programme and pupils eligible for Free School Meals made additional progress of on average seven months.