The EEF partnered with Leeds-based education charity SHINE to test projects that support parents to help improve their children’s cognitive skills at home before they start school. PACT was funded through this collaboration.

A previous randomised- controlled-trial of the PACT programme, working with staff in children’s centres to support families and funded by the Nuffield Foundation, found the programme had an impact on children’s language and early literacy skills. EEF funded this trial to build the evidence further, by evaluating the programme with a larger sample of families.

In this project PACT was delivered between October 2019 and August 2020. As a consequence of the COVID-19 pandemic, and subsequent closure of early years settings to all but vulnerable children and children of key workers, there was significant disruption to intervention and trial delivery. Assessments of children’s language skills immediately following the intervention were cancelled, and the primary outcome was changed to the delayed post-testing point. The measure for language skills was changed, and the assessment was delivered by school staff rather than researchers blinded to allocation.

Assessments completed 10-months after intervention delivery showed children who received PACT made, on average, no additional months’ progress in language skills compared to children who did not receive the programme. This result has a moderate to high security rating; however, consideration should be made of the disruption to delivery of the intervention and the changed education context during this period due to the COVID-19 pandemic.

The PACT intervention had a positive but low impact on the Home Learning Environment (HLE) when measured towards the end of programme delivery, but this impact was not maintained when assessed again five months later. This result has a lower level of security as there were high levels of missing data at immediate post-test (32%) meaning this finding should be interpreted cautiously.

Due to the impact of COVID-19 on this PACT trial, there were research questions that it was not possible to answer. In Autumn 2020 the EEF agreed to retrial the PACT programme in the 2021/22 academic year involving some of the schools who took part in this project. This re-trial will seek to assess the impact of PACT on children’s oral language skills at immediate post-test.

• At the start of the trial the children attended 47 maintained nurseries, most of which were attached to a primary school, but by the end of the evaluation (when children were in Reception) they were spread across 122 schools.
• Nurseries in the PACT trial were state-funded nurseries in the North West, most of which were attached to a primary school.
• Most nurseries participating in the project were Good or Outstanding in terms of Ofsted ratings and their school-level Reading progress scores were average for the majority of settings.
• Average FSM for the 37 settings in this trial that had a school attached (and therefore could provide a FSM measure for the school) was higher than the national average.

• PACT is a manualised teaching programme, published for this trial by BookTrust. The programme is designed for use by parents/​carers in the home with their pre-school children. It is not yet commercially available.
• PACT consists of teaching materials, organised into six packs each containing five weeks of activities.
• Parents/​carers were asked to attend a 1.5 – 2‑hour small group training session, held at the nursery the child attended.
• During the trial, the average number of weeks of materials parents engaged with was 18 weeks. Some of the barriers to implementation which were identified by parents included struggling to fit all the PACT sessions into the week, not being able to fit the daily twenty minute session into the day, and keeping their child interested and motivated with some of the PACT elements that involved repeated reading of stories.