At Keighley Community Nursery in West Yorkshire, children have been excited by the recent arrival of a bundle of new toys, which all have one thing in common – they have been carefully chosen to develop skills in numeracy. When the setting began receiving EYPP funding last April, it identified numeracy alongside communication and health and well-being as a key area for investment.
‘We were aware that our staff team had not accessed any numeracy or early maths training recently, if at all, so training for staff was essential to provide them with more ideas, confidence, and an increased or new understanding of how we can support and encourage children to explore numbers,’ says Joanna Smith, nursery manager. ‘We then audited our pre-school room to identify which resources were already available, which existing resources may need replacing or enhancing, and which resources were on site, but not currently in use. Once we had a better understanding of what we had and what we may need, we went shopping!’
The amount of funding the setting receives varies from term to term, but was around £2,000 for the first term and £1,300 for the second. The resources, which were ordered from Reflections on Learning, included stop watches, weighing scales, sorting and matching games, problem-solving activities and tape measures, and cost around £400. Staff training was provided online by the National Day Nurseries Association, at a cost of around £67 per person. It included ideas on bringing maths into outdoor activities – linking numeracy to another curriculum focus, physical development. The nursery has spent further EYPP funds on improving access to its outdoor areas, including the purchase of waterproof all-in-ones to allow children outside in all weathers, as well as investing in a sports coach who visits the setting twice a week.
The stated aim of the EYPP is to close the gap between children from disadvantaged backgrounds and their peers, and many early years providers, like Keighley, are choosing to invest the funding in resources and training which support the early years curriculum. This approach has the advantage that nurseries can measure the impact of the spend, through tracking eligible children’s progress against targets. According to the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF)’s early years toolkit, which rates interventions by cost-effectiveness, an investment in early literacy or numeracy can have a moderate impact for a very low cost, representing on average the equivalent of an extra five months’ learning for numeracy and four for literacy. Physical development approaches are rated as having a low impact for a very low cost, representing on average the equivalent of two extra months’ progress, while social and emotional learning strategies are judged to have a moderate impact for a moderate cost, representing an additional three months.
Numeracy has proved to be a popular EYPP focus, but providers have also been investing creatively in supporting children’s physical development. The Windsor Centre for Children and Families in Wolverhampton has identified learning in the outdoors as a priority for EYPP spend, alongside helping children to regulate their emotions. Like Keighley, the setting invested in waterproofs for the children, and enhanced its Forest School with a gravel puddle area for exploring the effects of rainwater. EYPP money was also used to fund a training day on self-regulation and resilience.
The EEF toolkit rates the introduction of self-regulation strategies as an approach that offers high impact for a very low cost. ‘We could see the impact of the EYPP enhancements to children’s outcomes when we measured the children’s physical development and personal, social and emotional development before and after the enhancements, and looked at their progress,’ says the Windsor Centre’s nursery head teacher Claire Foster. The centre found that 92 per cent of children entering the nursery at well below age-related expectations made above-expected progress in physical development, as opposed to 32 per cent the previous year. Eighty per cent made above-expected progress in personal, social and emotional development, compared with 41 per cent the previous year.
The different ways in which settings are spending EYPP funding to support disadvantaged children’s progress through the early years curriculum are as varied as the needs of those children, but some areas of investment are proving more popular, with numeracy training for staff and investment in outdoor areas an especial focus for many.
As the outcomes at the Windsor Centre show, now that the EYPP funding has been available for almost a year, it is beginning to have a measurable impact on the children it is targeting.
CASE STUDY: PORTICO DAY NURSERIES
Managers at Portico Day Nurseries were aware that many children attending the group’s six private childcare facilities were lagging behind in numeracy. ‘It has been something coming out of our data analysis for the last couple of years, and we have not been able to crack it and raise outcomes, as we have done in other areas,’ says Sarah Fillingham, area manager.
Although some of the group’s settings are in deprived areas, there were very few EYPP-eligible children, so managers had to think carefully about how to invest the money to the greatest effect. ‘Our settings have a lot of two-year-old funded children, and we thought they would be eligible when they turned three and four, but a lot of them move on to school nurseries,’ says Ms Fillingham. ‘One of our settings, Portico West End, had been involved with the NDNA’s Literacy Champions programme and it had been successful for them, so we decided to roll out the NDNA’s Maths Champions programme in two settings, Moss Bank and Poppets.’
Maths Champions costs £330 per setting for NDNA members, and £370 for non-members, although the organisation is currently looking for 120 nurseries in selected trial areas to join the scheme for free as part of an EEF research project. A graduate member of staff is trained to take on the role of maths champion with the aim of building confidence among practitioners and children, embedding maths into play and activities. The programme includes online maths training for all members of staff and access to hundreds of maths-related resources, as well as online audit tools to help track outcomes. ‘One aspect we found useful was the webinars focusing on different issues such as working with boys, or different aspects of numbers and counting,’ says Ms Fillingham.
Clare Eccles, manager of Portico Moss Bank, trained as the Maths Champion for that setting. There were initially seven EYPP-eligible children, which dipped to one the next term and is now back to seven. She says the programme is benefiting all the children in the nursery, from the very youngest to the pre-schoolers. ‘Practitioners will meet before beginning to plan the month ahead and discuss priorities, and how they can tie in some kind of maths,’ she says. ‘They can use the online tools to access activities and plan next steps, adapting activities to each individual child.’
Activities include making different shapes out of play dough and setting up a shop. ‘The pre-school room has a little shop with teddies and games for “sale” – the children all have some coins and count out pennies for the correct amount,’ says Ms Eccles. The setting has only been involved in the programme for a term and a half, but Ms Eccles says they have already seen improvements. ‘We worked out that between summer and autumn there was a 10 per cent rise in numeracy outcomes,’ she says. It is harder to measure the impact on EYPP-eligible children, as Moss Bank last term only had one eligible child, but Ms Eccles says she has shown good progress.
The nursery group plans to invest in more resources to help them deliver the programme. ‘We have just done a big order, making sure all the areas are fully equipped – for example, egg timers for the home corner, and Numicon resources,’ says Ms Fillingham. Numicon is a multi-sensory approach to maths, using shapes and patterns which represent numbers. ‘We are doing a lot with loose parts – everyday materials that the children can manipulate and combine in different ways.’
Further information
Early Education’s EYPP newsletters have covered ideas for spend on physical development and personal, social and emotional development. https://early-education.org.uk/sites/default/files/LTAL%20newsletter%202.pdf
Education Endowment Foundation’s toolkit for early years settings looks at how best to spend their funding. It covers 12 topics, including early approaches to literacy and numeracy, each summarised in terms of their average impact on learning, the strength of the evidence supporting them and their cost. https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/evidence/early-years-toolkit/
More information about the NDNA’s Maths Champions programme, including how to get involved with the free research project: http://www.ndna.org.uk/NDNA/Community/Maths_Champions.aspx