A new collaborative project in East London is boosting children’s early language development through evidence-informed professional development.
Initial challenges had revealed the need to balance language strategies with emotional wellbeing. The result? A streamlined, research-based framework delivered through an iterative process.
These approaches improved adult–child interactions and created a collaborative 'third space' where research and practice inform each other.
Find out more about lessons learned from this valuable experience.
Julian Grenier and Lynn Ang
Supporting children’s early language development is a key aim for early education and childcare. Research evidence tells us that better vocabulary at age 5 is associated with improved progress in learning to read, better exam results aged 16, more likelihood of gaining a degree, and even better health at age 42 (Shuey and Kankaraš, 2018).
That’s why a group of us working in an economically disadvantaged area of East London felt it was a moral imperative to do more to help children develop stronger language and communication skills in the early years. Child poverty is strongly associated with poorer language development: could making improvements to the quality of early education and care help children to succeed against the odds?
To answer that question, a team at Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre worked closely with colleagues at UCL Institute of Education (IOE) to develop a programme of early years professional development. We wanted the training to be based on evidence, and we wanted it to make a rapid and positive impact on the life-chances of children in the local neighbourhood.
The Sheringham-IOE project team produced a rapid evidence review which the team at Sheringham turned into a year-long training programme called Manor Park Talks for all the local nursery settings and? schools. The Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) funded the work as a pilot programme.
Historically, many researchers had undertaken research projects in communities like Manor Park, visiting and gathering data, and then writing up and disseminating the findings. But we wanted to take a different approach with our project. We wanted to break down the barriers between research and practice, so that the community would immediately benefit from the work of the researchers. For that reason, we used a translational ‘research-to-practice’ approach to identify, distil and scale evidence-based best practice, improving the quality of care and education for the youngest children (Ang et. al. 2025)
Real world conditions are messy
So far, so neat.
But, readers who have worked in projects like this will already have anticipated that the roll out would be messy and full of surprises. In this blog, we want to focus on one particular surprise: we hadn’t anticipated the potential downsides in training participants in those evidence-informed practices to develop children’s language and communication.
It was striking that when we did the first round of visits to the settings. Managers and school-based leaders told us that staff were using the new strategies regularly, but were finding it difficult to remember them all because there were too many. One ruefully pointed to the poster we had created to summarise the strategies and commented that it looked more like the page of a textbook than a poster for her staff.
In the rooms, participants were working hard to use the strategies to promote communication. But the children were often unsettled, and sometimes distressed. They were mostly new to the settings and schools and were not yet feeling confident and settled.
One participant said they would normally put all their efforts into supporting children’s emotional wellbeing at this point in the year – but there wasn’t time.
Slowly two things sunk in.
- Our focus on evidence-informed practice had undermined the professional autonomy and ‘practice wisdom’ of the participants. Early years educators were doing what they had been trained to do, despite being unsure of whether this was the right priority.
- There are always trade-offs in early education and childcare, because time and energy are finite. By asking educators to spend more time using these strategies to boost children’s early language and communication, we had left them with less time to focus on settling in, soothing the children who were upset and building the confidence of those who were still finding their feet in a new social situation.
Taking stock
We met as a team of educators and researchers and took stock of the fact that the project wasn’t working. Yet we also reflected that it wasn’t necessary for the focus on language and communication to be at the expense of supporting children’s emotional wellbeing. Could we combine the two approaches? The project team re-examined the evidence base in the research. We highlighted the evidence that suggested children needed to feel confident, and that their educators knew them and cared about them as individuals, if they were to feel ready and willing to communicate.
At the same time, the educators reflected that it was challenging to use a huge range of strategies to support language and communication. It would make more sense to reduce the number of strategies and make sure these were appropriate for the children the educators were working with.
In other words, the ‘research evidence’ had to be co-produced and contextualised by the specific, local priorities of the settings.
The ShREC approach
As a result of this collaboration, we came up with a new pedagogical framework - the ShREC approach.
The mnemonic ShREC stands for: Share attention, Respond, Expand and develop Conversation (ShREC).
The approach was consistent with the research in the rapid evidence review, notably the emphasis on back-and-forth conversation (Romeo ref). Research tells us that extended back-and-forth interactions are especially important to children’s early language development.
ShREC was also consistent with the local findings and reflections of the educators. By always putting a priority on shared attention, we foregrounded the importance of giving time to children. When educators took time to find out what children were interested in playing, or provided enticing activities which drew children in, that implicitly supported the children who needed that adult attention and support to settle in. The next step, ‘respond’, explicitly gave agency to the children. Participants would wait for the child to communicate – either verbally, or non-verbally – before responding and then expanding on what the child said.
A simple but powerful pedagogical framework, grounded in robust research (Ang et. al. 2025), the ShREC approach was effective in translating evidence into practical teaching strategies that strengthened adult–child interactions and could be readily embedded in everyday practice.
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| Image credit: EEF |
Creating a third space for an encounter between research and practice
We think of this work now as creating a ‘third space’. Previously, the team at Sheringham Nursery School had taken research evidence and implemented it in their setting. Likewise, traditionally researchers had visited Sheringham to undertake fieldwork which was then interpreted back at their universities and published. In this collaborative ‘third space’, we ensured that evidence is interpreted and contextualised by educators on the ground in collaboration with researchers. This co-construction had implications for both researchers and educators in ensuring that the development of practice, through the ShREC approach, was tailored and grounded in research evidence.
We also learnt about the importance of using an iterative approach, with research informing practice and practice informing research.
We have summarised this learning in the REACT framework:
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