Parents and Children Together (PACT) is an early language programme for pre-school children (aged 3 – 4) that parents deliver to their child at home. PACT is centred on improving children’s language skills through interactive book reading, supplemented with direct teaching of vocabulary and work on narrative skills.
Parents are provided with structured activities and resources (e.g. storybooks) and deliver the programme to their child five days a week for approximately 20 minutes a day over 30 weeks of teaching. Parents receive a 2‑hour training session to deliver the programme to their child and a lead contact for the nursery receives a 4‑hour training session to support parents.
A previous randomised- controlled-trial of the PACT programme, working with staff in children’s centres located in areas with high levels of socio-economic disadvantage 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 an RCT of the programme with 3 – 4 year olds in school-based settings with delivery taking place Autumn 2019 – Summer 2020. This was funded to build the evidence further, by evaluating the programme in partnership with families recruited through schools, and with a larger sample. Unfortunately, the Covid-19 pandemic resulted in it not being possible to collect endline assessment data in Summer 2020. Given the positive evidence from the prior trial funded by Nuffield, the EEF agreed to fund a re-trial of the programme.
When assessed immediately after the intervention, children offered the PACT programme made, on average, no additional months’ progress in overall language skills compared to children who did not receive the PACT programme. This result has a moderate to high security rating.
Assessments completed 11 months after intervention delivery showed children who received PACT made, on average, 1 additional months’ progress in overall language skills compared to children who did not receive the programme. However, there is some uncertainty in this estimate and it may be that the true effect was no progress.
The evaluation team have identified three possible reasons for not replicating the findings from the first PACT trial:
- Using a different sampling approach: while the first trial was conducted through children centers, the second and third trials were carried out through school-based nurseries, with parents recruited from school-based nurseries being different from those recruited from children centres. For example, families recruited from nurseries may have been less in need of the PACT programme than families recruited from children’s centres;
- Changes in early years policy, such as updates to the EYFS curriculum, may have improved usual practice in nurseries, reducing or diluting the impact of this intervention; or
- The absence of an active control group in the later PACT trials may have led to compensatory behaviour in the control group, minimizing differences between the intervention and control groups in the PACT‑3 trial.
The EEF has no plans for a further trial of this programme.