主播大秀

In March this year, the 主播大秀 announced a  - one that builds on our existing educational strengths, and increases the impact of what we do for the benefit of our audiences and the UK as a whole, with the aim of encouraging social mobility.

Since that announcement, we have worked at pace with partners to explore these priorities in more detail, and to build and begin testing our proposals.

As we enter the first piloting phase of our early years language and literacy initiative, which has the aim of halving the pre-school language gap, I wanted to provide an update on our progress with this work and set out what’s happening next.

One of our main areas of focus has been to understand the rationale for early years language and literacy development, and how to encourage parents to support this. So we have convened a Language Advisory Group, comprised of experts from , ,  and the , to explore the necessary messages and approach that will form the basis of our initiative.

This group has provided incredibly valuable insight. For instance, their focus on contingent talk and how it can support child language development is helping to shape our approach. The Language Advisory Group has published a summary of their thinking so far which can be found on the .

The work of the Language Advisory Group, alongside our own audience research, has substantially informed the initial batches of content we have produced and we are just beginning to test the impact on our audience. We’ll do this through our first phase of piloting which is taking place in three wards across Greater Manchester over the next few weeks.

We have teamed up with the Greater Manchester Combined Authority to begin piloting our work. They already have a strategic focus on improving school readiness and have been hugely helpful in shaping our approach. In this first phase of piloting we’ll be testing content with new and expectant parents, as well as with front line workers.

In order to realise the ambitions outlined in our education vision, we want and need to work in partnership with a wide range of organisations. Tackling the language and literacy gap is such a big challenge that it needs a collective and collaborative approach across a variety of sectors.

Since March, we have engaged with dozens of organisations who have an interest in tackling this challenge. To make sure that development and implementation of our work is as impactful as possible, we have formed a steering group of key strategic partners, including the National Literacy Trust, Public Health England, the Education Endowment Foundation and the Big Lottery Fund. Their input has already been extremely helpful, and we look forward to working with them and others over the coming months.