High-quality early childhood education (ECE) can have a positive impact on children’s outcomes and can help mitigate the effects of disadvantage. Despite the progress made so far, bringing evidence-based programmes to scale in the UK can still pose some challenges. Structured manuals can be perceived as being too top-down or manualised; embedding practices or strategies from such programmes in the early years setting can be difficult; and the costs for comprehensive curricula can limit their use.
The Early Years Library, launched last month, is a free resource, developed by the Early Intervention Foundation and the PEDAL centre at the University of Cambridge, that aims to address the potential barriers to delivering evidence-based early childhood education. It is aligned to statutory requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), and includes 14 booklets across three vital areas of early years learning:
- Language & early literacy
- Early numeracy
- Social & emotional skills
An additional booklet on ‘Laying the foundations: Supporting children’s self-regulation’ is included, based on preliminary findings in this area.
Each booklet provides discrete evidence-informed practices, routines, strategies and behaviours that can be integrated into practitioners’ daily interactions with children.
The Early Years Library which is funded by the Nuffield Foundation, is based on an innovative research approach focused on identifying the ‘common elements’ of evidence-based programmes. To our knowledge this is the first time the approach is used with early childhood education programmes addressing children’s cognitive and social-emotional outcomes.
We examined 22 evidence-based early childhood education programmes for children aged 2–5 years with robust evidence of a positive impact on children’s numeracy, literacy, cognitive or social-emotional outcomes. For each programme, we read the manual and segmented lessons into a set of core activities, which were then analysed further to identify the practices being used.
With this information, we could identify the skills commonly taught across programme manuals, and the discrete practices used to teach them. We accepted as 'common elements’ those used in more than half of the relevant manuals. We also employed quantitative analysis to identify the most commonly used instructional methods (e.g. role play, songs, or didactic instruction and teacher modelling) for each discrete practice.
In total, we identified 55 discrete practice elements that were common across early childhood education programmes: 18 for language and early literacy skills, 16 for early numeracy skills, and 21 for social and emotional skills. We also identified practices to support five areas of self-regulation.
Following the identification of the discrete practice elements, we recruited an early years practitioner as a research assistant to help develop the content of the Early Years Library, and we formed an expert panel of 15 practitioners to support its development. The expert panel consisted of nursery workers, managers and childminders from both maintained and private settings across England and Wales. We met with practitioners bi-monthly and received input on a range of topics including the techniques and resources practitioners are currently using, how practitioners currently receive training, and what is feasible for practitioners in terms of continuing professional development.
Through interactive online workshops, practitioners were consulted on the tone, language, content and design of the Early Years Library. In between workshops, practitioners piloted the booklets in their setting and provided feedback on feasibility, usability and overall satisfaction. This feedback was used to further refine the booklets.
Part of the booklet on social and emotional skills:
In addition to working with the expert panel of practitioners on the development of the library, we consulted with experts from universities and interested organisations with expertise in ECE and early literacy and numeracy skills, including the Department for Education (DfE), Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), LEGO Foundation, Nuffield Foundation, Empowering Parents Empowering Communities, and the Chartered College of Teaching.
The result of this work is a free library that brings together the most effective strategies and practices used in evidence-based early years programmes. The library consists of a series of practitioner booklets, each targeting a particular skill (for instance recognising and controlling emotions, or print and letter knowledge), as shown in the two extracts below. The booklets provide practical information about what the skill is, why it is important and the common practices and instructional methods used across evidence-based manuals to develop this skill.
- Nursery World will be running a series on training based approaches from this toolkit early next year