Promoting language and literacy in nurseries

The Raising Early Achievement in Literacy programme (REAL) is an intervention that works with practitioners (usually in the early years) to support children’s early literacy development. The programme aims to help practitioners to build parents’ knowledge and confidence in creating a home learning environment that supports and encourages children’s reading, writing and oral language.
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) was commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) to independently evaluate the REAL programme.
The REAL programme was delivered by the National Children’s Bureau (NCB). It was delivered over five school terms, starting in the spring term (2020) of the nursery year and finishing in the summer term (2021) of the reception year. The age of children in the intervention was three to five years old across the delivery period. The activities included training and networking events for practitioners and home visits by practitioners to families in the treatment group.
Practitioners were required to conduct eight to ten home visits per family over the course of the intervention, each lasting 30-60 minutes and involving sharing of learning resources, modelling of activities for the parents and high-quality conversations with the parents about the activities and the child’s learning. However, due to the COVID-19 pandemic, from March 2020, in-person home visits were paused. By that point, practitioners had managed to deliver on average two home visits per family. From September 2020, the intervention was re-started, but all remaining home visits were conducted remotely as a result of social distancing guidance. NCB recommended that remote visits could be delivered using a variety of remote methods (e.g. telephone calls, video calls, sharing resources in the post).
The programme was delivered in 53 schools in the North West of England. Practitioners delivering the programme were typically nursery teachers or members of schools’ senior leadership teams with responsibility for the Early Years Foundation Stage.
The evaluation design originally included a two-arm multi-site family-level randomised controlled efficacy trial. However, the impact evaluation was cancelled in March 2021 due to the COVID-19 pandemic. A standalone implementation and process evaluation (IPE) was still carried out on the basis that IPE evidence on feasibility and perceived outcomes would still be useful for further development of the intervention. The IPE took place in all participating settings and aimed to assess delivery and perceived outcomes on practitioners, families and children.
The main research questions for this evaluation were as follows:
Data collection included observations of training and networking events, two surveys of practitioners (baseline and endline), three surveys of parents (baseline, interim and endline), interviews with practitioners and parents, and compliance data collection. The evaluation started in December 2018 and completed in July 2021.
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