Abstract
The Parents and Children Together (PACT) programme is an early language teaching programme delivered by parents or carers to their child in the year before they start reception. The overall aim of the programme is to improve children’s language development by increasing the frequency and quality of parent/carer-child interaction through the use of specific programme activities. PACT provides content for 150 home-based language teaching sessions using storybooks where it is expected parents/carers deliver 20-25 minutes sessions for, five days a week, for 30 weeks. Parents/carers receive a two-hour training session to deliver the programme to their child and a lead contact for the nursery (PACT lead) receives a five-hour training session to support parents.
Key conclusions
- Assessments completed ten months after intervention delivery (and following continued disruption to education and family life by the pandemic) showed children who received PACT made, on average, no additional months’ progress in overall language skills compared to children who did not receive the programme. This result has a moderate to high security rating.
- The subcomponents of the language measure show children who received PACT made, on average, one month of additional progress in expressive vocabulary compared to children who did not receive PACT. However, PACT children made, on average, one month less progress in listening comprehension and sentence repetition than non-PACT children. The two groups scored similarly in terms of receptive vocabulary.
- The PACT intervention had a positive but low impact on the home learning environment (HLE) when measured immediately after programme delivery but this was not maintained when assessed again five months later. This result has a lower security as there were high levels of missing data at immediate post-test (32%) meaning this finding should be interpreted cautiously.
- Parents/carers engaged well with the programme with engagement starting high but decreasing over time. The mean number of weeks completed by parents/carers was 18.71 out of 30. This was a similar number of sessions as the previous trial of PACT even though here Covid-19 disrupted programme delivery. Analysis showed that the more sessions delivered, the greater the impact the programme had on children’s language skills. However, even at high levels of delivery (90% of sessions completed), the impact of the programme ten months later was low at one month of additional progress.
- Interviews and surveys of participants reported that PACT had increased the amount of quality time parent/carers and their children routinely spent together and that parents/carers and nursery staff perceived that PACT had improved children’s language outcomes. The key difficulties faced by families in implementing the programme were finding time in the family routine for PACT sessions at the required intensity and, for some families, keeping children motivated for the duration of the programme.
Key conclusions
- Assessments completed ten months after intervention delivery (and following continued disruption to education and family life by the pandemic) showed children who received PACT made, on average, no additional months’ progress in overall language skills compared to children who did not receive the programme. This result has a moderate to high security rating.
- The subcomponents of the language measure show children who received PACT made, on average, one month of additional progress in expressive vocabulary compared to children who did not receive PACT. However, PACT children made, on average, one month less progress in listening comprehension and sentence repetition than non-PACT children. The two groups scored similarly in terms of receptive vocabulary.
- The PACT intervention had a positive but low impact on the home learning environment (HLE) when measured immediately after programme delivery but this was not maintained when assessed again five months later. This result has a lower security as there were high levels of missing data at immediate post-test (32%) meaning this finding should be interpreted cautiously.
- Parents/carers engaged well with the programme with engagement starting high but decreasing over time. The mean number of weeks completed by parents/carers was 18.71 out of 30. This was a similar number of sessions as the previous trial of PACT even though here Covid-19 disrupted programme delivery. Analysis showed that the more sessions delivered, the greater the impact the programme had on children’s language skills. However, even at high levels of delivery (90% of sessions completed), the impact of the programme ten months later was low at one month of additional progress.
- Interviews and surveys of participants reported that PACT had increased the amount of quality time parent/carers and their children routinely spent together and that parents/carers and nursery staff perceived that PACT had improved children’s language outcomes. The key difficulties faced by families in implementing the programme were finding time in the family routine for PACT sessions at the required intensity and, for some families, keeping children motivated for the duration of the programme.
| Original language | English |
|---|---|
| Place of Publication | London |
| Publisher | Education Endowment Foundation |
| Number of pages | 96 |
| Publication status | Published - 1 Dec 2022 |
| Externally published | Yes |