What is the Early Years Library?
The Early Years Library (EYL) is a free online resource for early years practitioners. It was created to help early years practitioners support young children’s development and essential skills for life.
The EYL was designed with early years practitioners. It describes strategies and activities that can be integrated into everyday practice to support key cognitive and social-emotional skills.
The EYL is based on the common elements of successful interventions for early language and literacy, early numeracy and social-emotional skills. Common elements are the strategies and techniques most commonly found across different evidence-based interventions.
The Early Years Library was developed with the Early Intervention Foundation (now Foundations) and can be found on their website, here:
www.eif.org.uk/resource/early-years-library
Our new research
Our new project aims to support the uptake of the EYL in early education and childcare settings. With our partner, The Centre for Evidence and Implementation, we are designing a toolkit to help practitioners use common elements in their everyday practice. The toolkit will be a package of training and support materials.
This project involves working collaboratively with early years practitioners and members of professional organisations, local government, and academia to co-design the toolkit, which will be tested and refined. This three-year project is funded by the Nuffield Foundation. It consists of three phases, as described in the diagram below.
Get involved
We are looking for interested early years practitioners and early education and childcare settings to work with us throughout this project.
Would you like to share your views on how to learn new knowledge and skills?
We are looking for practitioners to complete our 10-minute survey and share their views on current practice and how they develop their knowledge and skills. Participants can enter a prize draw to win one of five £50 Amazon vouchers.
If you would like to hear about additional opportunities to shape the Early Years Library through focus groups, interviews or early site pilots, or for more information, please contact Sara Baker or Julia Birchenough via earlyyearslibrary@educ.cam.ac.uk .
