NELI preschool is the nursery counterpart of Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI), an intervention that boosted the language skills of children in reception. NELI Preschool is aimed at achieving the same goal with children in early years settings. It was trialled with three-and four-year-olds in 65 nurseries between 2021 and 2022. Evidence shows that children who participated made the equivalent of three months additional progress in their language development.
“Speech and language have always been an area that we’ve struggled to improve among our cohorts of children, and this was exacerbated during Covid,” explains Headteacher Jane Rogers, who has been in the post for 13 years.
“Although I’ve always steered away from very structured initiatives, after the disruption caused by the pandemic, we knew we needed to try something different to see if it would make more of an impact. And thankfully, my fears around structure and children sitting on the carpet for hours were dispelled within the first week. NELI Preschool doesn’t pull children away from continuous provision. In fact, it has enriched our provision and practice to such an extent that we’ve rolled out our own version of it for the remaining 19 weeks of the year.
“On the ground, we could see very quickly the impact the programme was having. Children love the special words and there was banter and competitions among staff about who could make a sentence with the four special words of the week.”
