The Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI) was developed by a team from the University of Oxford led by Professor Charles Hulme and Professor Maggie Snowling. They understood that identifying children’s language needs early and providing targeted language support could ensure they have the fundamental foundations needed for good language and social and emotional development as well as later literacy and numeracy skills. They adapted approaches frequently used by speech and language therapists and developed the NELI intervention as a programme that could be delivered in schools to those pupils with the weakest oral language skills.
The NELI intervention is the best-evidenced oral language intervention in the world with a series of randomised controlled trials (the gold-standard for measuring the effectiveness of an intervention) and independent evaluations showing that it brings about educationally meaningful improvements:
