Skills for Life Early Years programme shows positive results

The Skills for Life Early Years programme, funded by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF), has been successfully implemented, analysed and evaluated.

The Skills for Life Early Years programme aimed to promote the personal, social and emotional development (PSED) and self-regulation skills of children aged 3-5 in Early Years settings such as nurseries and kindergartens. The programme is built on our existing Early Years Wellbeing Activity Cards which were created to support families during the pandemic, and our flagship social and emotional learning programme Zippy’s Friends for 5-7 year olds.

We were grateful for the support from The Northern Lights Stronger Practice Hub, who supported this project including the recruitment of the 12 participating Early Years settings in Sunderland.

The programme, which focused on supporting the most vulnerable children, included training sessions, which explored current research and practice in developing self-regulation skills. CPD meetings also discussed effective strategies to engage and support children and ideas to enhance Early Years Foundation Stage provisions further. Settings were able to choose from a wide variety of storybooks included in the programme structure, as well as a range of corresponding activities, delivered in small groups for their identified vulnerable children.

Key outcomes included:

• Practitioners highlighted the increased levels of engagement, concentration and independence for their vulnerable children.
• There was an increase in the range of language the children used to describe their feelings.
• Early Years practitioners learnt more ways to support children’s self-regulation skills and extended their own knowledge and teaching strategies.
• Children developed more personal coping skills and were able to tell others about them.

We are thrilled with these outcomes, especially as it supports us with meeting our priority goals of ‘Develop and promote a range of mental health promotion programmes that enhance the mental health and emotional resilience of children, teachers and parents’.