The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) is an evidence-based oral language intervention for children in nursery and reception who show weakness in their oral language skills and who are therefore at risk of experiencing difficulty with reading.
‘When the question arises each year, “Are we running NELI next year?”, I remind our teachers of one thing: the difference it has made to each individual child,’ explains assistant headteacher Shushila Bhanderi. ‘It’s been life changing. Their speech and language – and confidence – would not be where it is today without this input.’
The three-form entry primary school in the London Borough of Brent started delivering NELI in 2020, after the Government announced the first round of funding. Now in its third year, it has overcome the challenges of Covid and the programme is firmly embedded in practice.
‘We’re continuing with it. Although Reception teachers sometimes reminisce a time before NELI when their teaching assistants were not out of the classroom for large chucks at a time undertaking the group or individual sessions, the progress is clear for all to see,’ Bhanderi says.
‘We have a high ratio of children who have English as an Additional Language (EAL) – currently 96 percent – and a proportion of them are new to English. Over the past three years, NELI screening has mainly picked up the children with no English, from families with little English who are predominantly from India and Romania.
‘Darren*, one of the first cohort of children to complete NELI, had limited English and was stuttering in Romanian when he first started. But his confidence grew and by the end of Reception, he was conversing with friends and having-a-go at speaking in full sentences. Although he didn’t quite reach the age-related standards for language and communication, he blossomed at the end of the programme and was happy to talk to adults about his interests.
‘Three years later, he’s in Year Two and his speech and language is flourishing – he’s on level C of the EAL Assessment Framework for Schools proficiency bands, where A is new to English and E is fluent. His stammer has reduced – likely a result of his increased confidence – and he’s able to access the curriculum in ways that wouldn’t have been possible without the intervention.
‘NELI gives children who are “significantly below” in communication and language the chance to catch up with their peers early on. To be clear, these children would be at risk of being behind throughout their primary years if they didn’t have this programme.
Communication and language impacts on everything, including life skills and NELI gives them the grounding they need before we concentrate on other areas of the curriculum, such as reading and writing.Shushila Bhanderi, Assistant Headteacher, Uxendon Manor Primary School
‘The programme focuses on new vocabulary, what it means and how to use it in context, with lots of practitioner modelling. We usually start NELI in January and the first topic is body parts, which ties in with what we’re covering in class. The intervention class looks at feet, eyes, ears, nose, mouth, touching different body parts and repeating the vocabulary around this. We extend this in class, looking at other parts of the body to increase their vocabulary – eyebrows, eyelashes, chin and cheek.
‘Ted, the puppet, not only leads the sessions with the TAs – the quieter children whisper things to him – but he’s also part of continuous provision. A couple of children with selective mutism, who are not in the NELI sessions, have gravitated towards him.
‘Despite the challenges of delivering the programme with fidelity throughout Covid – we resorted to training Year One staff to deliver the last six weeks of the programme, which had to be cut short due to lockdowns – we’ve had a 76 per cent success rate with the number of children on NELI who have gone on to achieve “age related” in communication and language under the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Profile in the past three years. This is pretty good considering we only selected children who were “significantly below” rather than just “below” in the Language App screening. Our hope was that this investment in time, effort, and the continuous repetition along with the structured way that the programme is set out, would support those that needed it the most. And we’ve certainly seen a big difference in their confidence and ability to converse.’
