Menzies, Victoria;
Eerola, Paivi;
Ashraf, Bilal;
Zhang, Qing;
Cramman, Helen;
Einbeck, Jochen;
(2024)
Evaluating the impact of the Parents and Children Together
(PACT) programme on the language skills of 3- to 4-year-old
nursery children.
A two-armed randomised trial.
The Education Endowment Foundation: London, UK.
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Abstract
The Parent and Children Together (PACT; Burgoyne et al., 2018a) programme is an early language teaching programme developed and managed by a team based at the University of Manchester and led by Dr Kelly Burgoyne. The PACT programme is delivered by parents/carers to their pre-school child in the year before they start school. The overall aim of the PACT programme is to improve pre-school children’s language development by increasing the frequency and quality of parent/carer-child interaction and communication through the specific programme activities. The PACT programme was delivered by parents/carers over a period of 30 weeks. Parents/carers delivered structured language activities, based on storybooks provided by the programme, five days a week, for approximately 20 minutes a day. Parents/carers received a two-hour online training session to deliver the programme to their child. Nursery staff received a four-hour training session to help them to support parents. 372 children from 43 school nurseries took part in this efficacy trial. It was a two-armed randomised controlled efficacy trial where 186 children received PACT and 186 formed the ‘usual care’ comparison group. PACT was aimed at families with a child aged 3-4 years who attended state-maintained school nurseries in disadvantaged areas in the North West of England. Children were eligible if they were moving into the Reception year-group at school in September 2022 (the academic year immediately following the PACT programme). The primary outcome was overall language skills measured using the LanguageScreen app. The secondary outcomes included expressive and receptive vocabulary, spoken language information and grammar, early literacy skills, the child’s home learning environment, and school readiness. A process evaluation was also conducted, including observations, surveys, interviews, and using the PACTApp for tracking individual sessions completed by families. The trial started recruitment in March 2021. Randomisation took place in October 2021 and the intervention was delivered between November 2021 and June 2022. Post-testing took place in June-July 2022. Delayed post-testing took place in May-June 2023.
| Type: | Report |
|---|---|
| Title: | Evaluating the impact of the Parents and Children Together (PACT) programme on the language skills of 3- to 4-year-old nursery children. A two-armed randomised trial |
| Open access status: | An open access version is available from UCL Discovery |
| Publisher version: | https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ |
| Language: | English |
| Additional information: | You may re-use this document/publication (not including logos) free of charge in any format or medium, under the terms of the Open Government Licence v3.0. To view this licence, visit https://nationalarchives.gov.uk/doc/open-government-licence/version/3 or email: psi@nationalarchives.gsi.gov.uk Where we have identified any third-party copyright information you will need to obtain permission from the copyright holders concerned. The views expressed in this report are the authors’ and do not necessarily reflect those of the Department for Education. |
| UCL classification: | UCL UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences UCL > Provost and Vice Provost Offices > School of Life and Medical Sciences > Faculty of Population Health Sciences > UCL GOS Institute of Child Health |
| URI: | https://discovery.ucl.ac.uk/id/eprint/10209223 |
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