High quality early childhood education (ECE) can make a crucial contribution to equal life chances for children. ECE staff tend to have a wide range of qualifications and experience, with variable skills and knowledge to support children’s development. In this talk, we will share recent collaborative work by our team from Cambridge, the Early Intervention Foundation and the Centre for Evidence and Implementation that aims to develop ECE workers’ professional learning using a novel methodology. We systematically reviewed ECE programmes with a strong research evidence base, then we extracted the common elements of practice from those programmes. These common elements were the basis for developing our Early Years Library. Next, we worked collaboratively with early years practitioners and implementation experts to co-design training and support materials through a series of rapid cycle testing and refinement. This talk situates the common elements methodology among other approaches to generating robust evidence, like more traditional randomized trials. We examine the notions of feasibility and enablers for implementation in the context of non-manualised approaches to professional learning.

Bio: Prof Sara Baker is a Professor of Developmental Psychology and Education (Faculty of Education, Cambridge) and a 2022 UNESCO-IBE Senior Fellow in the Science of Learning. Dr Julia Birchenough is a Research Associate, Faculty of Education, Cambridge. This work is funded by the Nuffield Foundation

Teams link: teams.microsoft.com/meet/3825967966058?p=oaa4boDA3tu5ZnqMja