Tales Toolkit: Pilot Report

Tales Toolkit is a package of training and resources supporting 3 – 5‑year-old children’s early language and social development through oral storytelling. It was designed and developed by Kate Shelley of Tales Toolkit Ltd, supported by Dr Alice Jones Bartoli, director of the School and Family Studies at Goldsmiths University of London. In Tales Toolkit sessions, educators guide children through an interactive process of creating their own story, making use of props or pictures relevant to children and symbols representing four key parts of a story: character, setting, problem and solution.

As part of the Department for Education’s Early Years Recovery Programme, the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) has worked with Stronger Practice Hubs across England to fund Early Years settings’ access to evidence-informed programmes and study the programmes’ influence on practice and children’s outcomes. This initiative aims to support education recovery following the pandemic, whilst also developing our understanding of effective professional development in the early years. The EEF worked with Thames Valley Early Years Stronger Practice Hub to fund settings’ access to Tales Toolkit and evaluate the programme through this pilot study.

This evaluation, led by IES, found that Tales Toolkit showed some evidence of promise, with most educators who took part in surveys and interviews reporting increased confidence, high motivation to deliver the approach and changes in their practice, including in relation to supporting children’s language development, collaborative story-telling and child-led play. Educators also reported that they had observed positive changes in children’s outcomes in relation to communication and language and personal, social and emotional development, such as perceived improvements in creativity, vocabulary and problem-solving. These benefits were also observed for children with special educational needs and disabilities and children with English as an additional language.

There were mixed findings in relation to the feasibility of implementation. Educators who took part in surveys and interviews towards the end of the study reported that the training was high-quality and that the programme was straightforward to deliver. However, there were variable levels of training completion across settings and ten of the thirty settings that took part in the pilot withdrew from programme delivery over the course of the study. Most of the settings that withdrew were private, voluntary and independent settings, and reported that staffing and capacity challenges had affected their ability to engage with the programme.

Monitoring of training completion and provision of additional support to help educators to progress through the training, change their practice and implement the programme with children could help ensure educators are able to get the most out of Tales Toolkit. These adaptations to support implementation could help to enable readiness for a trial in future while maintaining the programme’s valued flexibility.