Question to the Department for Education:

To ask the Secretary of State for Education, whether her Department is taking steps to increase the reach of the Nuffield Early Language Intervention programme for the purposes of supporting covid-19 education recovery.

The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) programme, part of the Department’s education recovery response, has played an important role in improving children’s language and communication skills following the COVID-19 pandemic.

In September 2023, the Education Endowment Foundation published an independent evaluation of the programme’s effects in 2021/22. This demonstrated that children who received the programme made the equivalent of four months’ progress in language skills, on average, compared to children who did not receive NELI. Pupils eligible for free school meals made additional progress on average of seven months.

Since the programme was launched in 2020, just over 11,100 schools (over two thirds of all primaries) have signed up to deliver NELI. To increase the reach of the programme, the Department has confirmed it will be funding all registered schools to continue delivering the programme in the 2023/24 academic year. To promote uptake, the delivery partner will be engaging all registered schools through a mixture of regular communications, support, and targeted outreach.