NFER was commissioned by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) to conduct an impact evaluation of the second wave of the national roll-out of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI). The national roll-out was funded by the Department for Education as part of the Government’s education recovery efforts during the Covid-19 pandemic.
NELI is a 20-week intervention involving scripted small group and individual sessions and delivered by trained teaching assistants (TAs) to Reception pupils with weak oral language skills. Previous EEF-funded efficacy and effectiveness trials have shown that NELI has a positive impact on the language skills of pupils receiving the intervention.
We used a quasi-experimental Regression Discontinuity Design (RDD) to investigate the impact of NELI when delivered at national scale. The evaluation analysed data from more then 10,000 pupils in 356 primary and infant schools.
