The NELI Programme – Helping children take strides in their learning
Hear how NELI complements everything St Michael's School does, ensuring the children who need support get that extra boost right from the beginning of their time at school
St Michael’s is a one-form entry, inner-city primary school based in a very transient area of Oxford in England. 30% of their children speak English as an Additional Language and 11% of the school roll is on the Special Needs register. They have been using LanguageScreen and the NELI intervention since 2020, despite the council strongly recommending an alternative programme, as they find LanguageScreen and NELI to be more robust and effective. Here Matthew Lindars, Acting Deputy Head and Early Years Lead shares why they find NELI very effective in improving children’s communication and language skills.
A thorough assessment we can be confident in
At the beginning of the academic year, we allow the children the first couple of weeks to settle into school life, develop new routines and build relationships with their peers and adults. Once we’ve conducted the Government’s baseline assessment and our own in-school baselines, we then assess all Reception children using the LanguageScreen assessment.
LanguageScreen is fantastic because it provides so much information about the children’s early language skills. We find it useful to have an indication of areas of weakness for children we may not have anticipated, for example, sentence repetition or listening comprehension.
With the assessment being tablet-based, we don’t need excessive amounts of paperwork or additional resources to hand or prepared to deliver the assessment. Furthermore, the results are automatically scored, and the assessment creates an analysis document which saves our practitioners time.
And, as the results are standardised, we are confident that the scores pre- and post-assessment are reflective of the children and their progress.
Helping children take strides in their learning
We deliver the NELI intervention to approximately 4-6 children each year. These children are normally in Reception, but we have included children from other year groups in the past, for example, when a child recently came to live in the UK, had very little English and couldn’t access their year group’s curriculum.
We deliver four group sessions a week and one individual session. We love that everything is supplied with the programme and the NELI handbook is really clear. But what is also useful is having the freedom to shape the intervention to suit the needs of the children in the group. NELI should be followed as closely as possible, but it also provides us with flexibility to ensure it best suits our children.
When we first started our NELI journey the sessions were done straight after lunch but we now deliver the group sessions after morning snack. We’ve found that the children are more engaged since this change so we’d definitely recommend working out when in the school day your children are getting the most out of their sessions.
As a result of being part of the NELI intervention, we’ve seen children’s confidence in participating in lessons and discussions increase. The structured programme helps children to know what is expected of them, and we see this transference back into the classroom. It has also helped the children form friendships as their speech, communication and language skills have increased. In addition, so has their personal, social and emotional development.
Parental Engagement
Given the increase in children with language difficulties and delay since the pandemic, our parents are happy to know we have something we can provide to help their children’s communication and language skills. We use the reports from LanguageScreen to feedback to parents during parents’ evening and the families find the information included useful. Parental feedback on their children post-intervention has always been very positive too with many not able to believe the progress their children have made. Having a systematic programme such as NELI definitely helps and reassures our parents.
A proven, positive impact
As a school, we think the NELI Programme has been absolutely fantastic for our children who have taken part in it. We are in our fourth year of using it and the children’s progress scores are continuing to rise year on year, especially when compared to their peers who have not taken part in the intervention. NELI is great for many reasons, it has helped upskill staff, we’re able to identify and target children with specific support early and all the resources are provided.
The table represents academic year 2023-24. There was an intervention group of 5 children, with one child leaving partway through the year. The children in blue did not receive the intervention.
At St Michael’s we are dedicated to helping our children develop a lifelong love of learning so that they can fulfil their dreams and be the best that they can be and NELI complements everything we do in school, ensuring the children who need support get that extra boost right from the beginning of their time at school.