IOE (Institute of Education), UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society (University College London, UK) has a long tradition of engaging with and influencing early years education policy and practice both locally and nationally through its long-standing partnerships with schools nationally. This article presents a critical discussion of one such relationship, which involved a participatory approach to translating and embedding evidence-informed practice in eight early years settings in East London. The research project Manor Park Talks was undertaken between 2019 and 2021 in collaboration with researchers from the IOE and a head teacher and education practitioners from East London Teaching and Research School. The project aimed to enhance the professional development of early years education practitioners in a cluster of eight early years settings to support young children’s language development and communication.

In this article, we start by discussing the historical tradition of partnerships between schools and the IOE. We then consider the nature of successful research to practice partnerships. We describe the case of our project, Manor Park Talks, with particular attention to describing the methodological innovation of the project and implications of the findings on education practitioners’ professional development and early years practice. We conclude by discussing the broader implications of research-informed practice in partnerships between researchers and practitioners.

When the London Day Training College (now known as IOE, UCL’s Faculty of Education and Society) was established in 1902, one of the prime purposes of the college was to provide ‘well-trained teachers for service to London’s elementary school’ (Alrich and Woodin, 2021: 12). The link between the IOE and London schools has been at the heart of the IOE since its inception. Over time, partnerships have evolved and taken on different forms. First, the IOE provides academic courses for teachers, ranging from short courses to postgraduate levels. Placements for teachers in Postgraduate Certificate in Education programmes have also been provided by a network of London schools. Professional development opportunities are also available – for example, through National Professional Qualifications in Leadership and the Early Career Framework, which supports early career teachers and their mentors. The connection between schools and the IOE in these cases provides a physical context in which learning can take place, either within the university or in the school, and offers an avenue for knowledge exchange and learning from each other. This type of relationship fosters the bringing together of university and school-based expertise to create and embed knowledge and theory to evidence-based practice. At the IOE, this relationship has been built over many decades through the many research–practice partnerships that exist between academics, schools, teacher educators and school leaders nationally and from around the world to develop a rich experience of translating evidence into practice.

Improving life chances through education is a common aim of both schools and universities. There have been various initiatives in recent years which aim to fund innovative programmes (for example, the Investing in Innovations [i3] funds in the United States) at various points of their development (pilot, validation or scale-up), and which aim to improve student outcomes (Centre for Public Impact, 2019). In the United Kingdom, the Educational Endowment Foundation (EEF, 2022) is part of the government’s What Works Network and aims to identify, fund and evaluate projects that will raise attainment of children from economically disadvantaged backgrounds.

Despite the movement towards establishing what works in practice, the interventions or knowledge in question tend to lose their efficacy when they move beyond the pilot stage. Sheard and Sharples (2016: 669) argue that ‘sometimes the knowledge reaches educators, sometimes the educators might use the knowledge’, but that ‘overall, the relationship between research evidence and educational provision and practice is tenuous and controversial’. Oates and Bignell (2019) suggest that the partnership between school and university is critical for facilitating collaborative learning and enquiry, and improving educational practice for student teachers, but this can be fraught with difficulties and tensions in practice. Part of the challenge for organisations such as the EEF is to find pragmatic solutions to bridging the research to practice gap. Bridging the gap between research and application is a complex problem, and Carnine (1997: 513) argues that these gaps occur for many reasons, including, but not limited to: no direct application of research to practice, researchers’ pursuit of ‘esoteric topics with limited anchoring in the real world’ and little to no involvement of practitioners in research decisions. Often, the ‘linearity’ of the research process (conducting research prior to dissemination results) can obstruct researchers learning from organisations about what they need to know and organisations from learning about how researchers could usefully inform their professional development and practice. It is important, therefore, to explore the possibilities for research and problem solving when researchers and organisations engage together. This research–practice partnership lies at the heart of our project, Manor Park Talks.

The partnership between our school and IOE emerged from a collaborative project between researchers and a leading teaching and research school in Newham, London, to provide evidence-informed professional development for early years practitioners working with young children to support their early communication and language development. The project partners were two researchers from IOE, the head teacher of the school and the early years practitioners working with children, both in Sheringham Teaching and Research School and in other early years settings in the borough of Newham. The socio-economic context of the local community is a distinct feature of the project. The London Borough of Newham is the third-largest borough in London, with a rich and diverse community including minority ethnic groups making up 73 per cent of the local population. The majority of children are from Indian (14.9 per cent) and Bangladeshi-heritage (12.5 per cent) families with English as an additional language (Newham Council, 2022). Of the neighbourhoods in Newham, 8 per cent are described as highly deprived, and the borough is ranked 20th in the United Kingdom in terms of local authorities with the highest levels of unemployment and income deprivation (Department for Communities and Local Government, 2015).

It has been well established by extant empirical research that language development in the early years for children of two to five years old is associated with cognitive development and later educational attainment (Law et al., 2017). The development of communication skills is mediated by the environment to which children are exposed, both in and outside the home (Weigel et al., 2007). Understanding the quality of engagement and input that children receive in early years settings, and how this is applied in practice, is therefore vital in supporting language development and communication. There have been various initiatives in recent years that aim to translate research evidence about strategies to support language development to improve education outcomes (Centre for Public Impact, 2019).

The socio-economic and research context outlined above informed the overarching objective of the research, which was to embed evidence-based practices in supporting language into action, with the specific intention of improving the life chances and educational outcomes of disadvantaged children. The research drew on a practice-focused participatory approach in the co-production of the research design, methodology and application of the findings in a close collaboration between the IOE researchers and practitioners in the East London research school.

The aims of the project were:

to improve the outcomes of disadvantaged two-year-olds accessing free early education entitlement and to take a research-informed approach to ‘weigh up the evidence’ of what works to support early language and communication

The initial overarching research question that guided the enquiry between researchers and practitioners was: What strategies are associated with positive outcomes in teacher practices and children’s early communication and language development?

The research was based on a systematic review design using a participatory approach conducted in two phases in partnership with project partners: headline themes and refined review. Using a participatory approach, our project sought to break ‘the linear mould of conventional research’ (Cornwall and Jewkes, 2010: 794) by engaging closely with adults, in this case education practitioners, as key stakeholders in the translation and application of theory and evidence to early years practice. Cornwall and Jewkes (2010) describe this approach as being characterised as:

driven by local people and local priorities

Participatory research is a common methodology often adopted in education and the wider social sciences that is applied on the principle that the research or study is co-constructed in collaboration with participants or key stakeholders who have direct knowledge and experience of a particular phenomenon, and should have greater authority in the enquiry process than any others (Flewitt and Ang, 2020).

Ang (2015: 4) argues that such an approach can help participants to ‘make sense of their own situations’, and requires researchers to adopt a critical stance in the implementation and operationalisation of research design. Cumbo and Selwyn (2021) discuss the increasing use of participatory design approaches in educational research that can benefit school-based research partnerships. Adopting a participatory approach through a school–university collaboration therefore provides an important impetus for researchers and school stakeholders to derive mutual understanding and consensus about a shared research purpose, and encourages communications about the ways in which professional development and teaching practices can be understood from a variety of standpoints and perspectives in a rich and meaningful way. In the next section, we describe Manor Park Talks as an example of such an approach.

The project team of researchers and school partners engaged in regular meetings and correspondence about the review process as we reflected collectively on the key themes. As a collaborative project, we maintained continuous dialogue throughout the research process to explore and agree the scope and focus of the research. We narrowed the scope of the review as the project partners identified that they intended to focus on the ‘managing interactions and conversational responsiveness’ strategy as the key focus of the project, as a means to support young children’s language and communication. The refined review question was then derived: What strategies for managing interactions with young children are associated with positive outcomes in teacher practices and children’s early communication and language development?

We then focused on the 72 articles on managing interactions and conversational responsiveness (see Figure 1 for a full summary of the process). We used the ‘weight of evidence’ (WOE) technique as suggested by Cordingley in Basma and Savage (2018) to address the jointly decided refined research question. In a weight of evidence review, the studies are rated on three WOE criteria, and then assigned an overall rating.

Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre is a maintained nursery school serving the communities in the Manor Park and Little Ilford areas of Newham. Sheringham leads a network of early years settings in the neighbourhood: private and community nurseries, which are generally small, under-funded and housed in non-purpose-built accommodation such as church halls or former shop units. As a maintained school, Sheringham has a larger budget for professional development. The school made a strategic decision to allocate part of the budget for joint professional development, so that projects could be on a larger scale and reach more children. As part of this strategy, the school, in collaboration with the IOE, made a successful funding application for Manor Park Talks. The funding was awarded from the EEF, and the project was externally evaluated by NatCen (see EEF, 2020 for the full evaluation of the project).

In Manor Park and Little Ilford, the housing crisis is particularly acute. On home visits, nursery school staff regularly meet families crammed into very small flats, often with four or more children in each bedroom. The high rate of child poverty, and the extreme stress on parents trying their best in very difficult circumstances, can combine to make the home environment less than optimal for children’s language development. Research suggests that in areas of social and economic disadvantage, between 40 per cent and 56 per cent of children start school with language delay (Law et al., 2011; Locke et al., 2002).

The initial conception of the project to inform a professional development programme was premised on an ethic of community development: that the school would work collaboratively with parents and practitioners to enhance children’s early development. The project was also conceived on the shared understanding that supporting children’s language development is not only the responsibility of parents and families, some of whom live in harsh and difficult social and economic conditions, but also the responsibility of education practitioners and educators in the early years settings. As such, the project design took the approach that a model of ‘disseminating’ effective practice in the nursery school to the smaller nursery settings in the local area had to be delivered in a collaborative partnership with researchers, education practitioners and the research school.

In designing the study, we drew on the following key principles:

taking responsibility for all local children in the borough, not just the minority who attend Sheringham Nursery School

The project focused on promoting a list of evidence-informed pedagogical strategies as part of a professional development programme for education practitioners to employ when playing and interacting with children. The target population was children between two and three years old from low-income families who were accessing a free nursery place. The programme focused on:

promoting children’s language development

The project revealed opportunities and also unexpected challenges. As part of the iterative cycle of implementing the professional development programme, an independent evaluation team from NatCen (EEF, 2020) worked with the project team at Sheringham and IOE to review and evaluate the project at particular stages of its implementation. Two key findings from the formative evaluation were:

The project focused on young children’s language interactions. However, a few practitioners noted that children’s emotional well-being was important and required equal attention. As a result, this informed further refining of the review protocol to ensure the project team reviewed the evidence base to draw more attention to the importance of practitioners supporting children emotionally at the same time as encouraging language and communication.

The education practitioners involved in the Manor Park Talks project found that they could put the new strategies into practice regularly, and that these new practices were manageable within their busy days. The team at Sheringham Nursery School reflected on further learning points at the end of the programme. These included:

The project arguably put too much emphasis on conversation and conversational turns, and not enough emphasis on vocabulary. Since the project ended, practitioners at the nursery school have continued to use the strategies, together with an increased focus on introducing children to new vocabulary through both explicit and implicit means (for example, highlighting new words in books they are sharing with children, and taking care to introduce richer vocabulary while playing with children).

The project and implementation of the professional development programme showed that there is clear evidence of the importance of supporting early language and communication (Law et al., 2017). Research indicates that instructional practices, implemented with fidelity, can potentially improve children’s academic and social progress (Castro et al., 2017). Through a systematic review, we identified key instructional practices that have been described in well-designed, rigorous empirical studies. As a school–university partnership, the project reinforced the importance of adopting a methodological approach that involved stakeholders from the conception of the enquiry to the application of the findings to inform a practice tool for education practitioners in an iterative manner. The project also offered an opportunity for critical reflection for both researchers and school partners in the collaborative process of translating and embedding evidence into practice. It sparked discussions around what counts as evidence and embedding research-informed strategies to support children’s learning, which in turn revealed the opportunities, as well as the challenges, encountered in the research cycle.

We argue for a conceptual, theoretical model that breaks through the ‘linearity’ of research in favour of a participatory approach where the researchers and participants co-construct, collaborate and engage in a community of research, practice and shared enquiry to improve practice, rather than just to disseminate or impart knowledge.