Impact of a play-based curriculum in the first two years of primary school: literacy and numeracy outcomes over seven years

In 2000–2002 an innovative early years curriculum, the Enriched Curriculum (EC), was introduced<br/>into 120 volunteer schools across Northern Ireland, replacing a traditional curriculum similar to<br/>others across the UK at that time. It was intended by the designers to be developmentally appropriate<br/>and play-based with the primary goal of preventing the experience of persistent early failure in<br/>children. The EC was not intended to be a literacy and numeracy intervention, yet it did considerably<br/>alter pedagogy in these domains, particularly the age at which formal reading and mathematics<br/>instruction began. As part of a multi-method evaluation running from 2000–2008, the research<br/>team followed the primary school careers of the first two successive cohorts of EC children, comparing<br/>them with year-ahead controls attending the same 24 schools. Compared to the year-ahead control<br/>group, the findings show that the EC children’s reading and mathematics scores fell behind in<br/>the first two years but the majority of EC children caught up by the end of their fourth year. Thereafter,<br/>the performance of the first EC cohort fell away slightly, while that of the second continued to<br/>match that of controls. Overall, the play-based curriculum had no statistically significant positive<br/>effects on reading and mathematics in the medium term. At best, the EC children’s scores matched<br/>those of controls.