Implementing effective early education interventions at scale

This project will evaluate the implementation of the Playtime with Books programme, which aims to enhance early learning by supporting families to engage in high-quality book sharing interactions.

Why this project is important

Book-sharing interventions for parents with young children have been proven to be an effective way of improving early language development and potentially addressing the socio-economic disadvantage gap. Despite this potential, there is no effective book-sharing intervention that has been successfully scaled in the UK and a dearth of effective programmes that support the home learning environment for families with young children

Playtime with Books is a virtual programme for families with children aged 10-24 months that is based on a face-to-face programme with robust evidence of impact. A previous Nuffield funded project adapted a face-to-face programme to be deliverable online. The adapted programme has been shown to be acceptable by parents experiencing socio-economic disadvantage and feasible to deliver by practitioners.

What it will involve

The research team will now implement and test Playtime with Books at scale in two contrasting local authorities, with the aim of supporting the large-scale roll-out of the intervention and providing insights into the successful scaling of effective, early years interventions. The project will be completed in four stages, based on implementation science:

1. Workshops with policymakers, commissioners, and service leads to understand the local contexts which may support or hinder widespread commissioning of Playtime with Books.  
2. Two trailblazing sites will conduct needs assessments to identify which groups of families could benefit most, potential referral pathways, services that could deliver the programme, and develop a local implementation plan.
3. In the implementation phase, delivery services, practitioners and referral partners will be trained and the programme evaluated. The evaluation will include assessing the acceptability of the training, monitoring of fidelity and quality of delivery, families’ engagement with the programme, monitoring of changes in parents’ and children’s outcomes, and the success of local adaptations to the programme.  
4. The final stage will investigate how the programme can be sustained in each local authority longer-term without the support of the research team.

How it will make a difference

The outputs of this study will be shared with key stakeholders and include the online intervention programme ‘Playtime with Books’, with an accompanying training package; and a flexible implementation guide to support scaling early years programmes in local systems.