Fourteen months ago, Emotion Coaching UK were approached by the Education Endowment Foundation (EEF) https://educationendowmentfoundation.org.uk/ to submit an application for their 2022 Autumn Funding Round. The EEF proposed we submit a Grant Application for an Emotion Coaching training programme aimed to support the development of Personal, Social, and Emotional Development (PSED) skills in the Early Years.
We suspect part of the reason we were approached is because of all the work our Emotion Coaching community has been doing to raise awareness and support practice and use of this relational style of communication. In many ways this is very much a community project.
Jump forward to the end of January 2024...
We have now officially launched the Emotion Coaching Early Years Project in collaboration with the EEF, The Stronger Practice Hubs and Norland College (our delivery partner):
The response to our launch was immediate and enthusiastic. Even at this early stage, it is clear that there is an appetite for considering the adoption of a relational style of communication for use with all children and developing a greater understanding on how to help children learn about self-regulation.
The research training programme is a randomised controlled trial (RCT). We will be looking specifically at the use of Emotion Coaching and its impact upon children's self-regulation skills.
Whilst we and the wider community have been able to engage in smaller research projects in efforts to develop the evidence base of Emotion Coaching, a RCT was beyond our experience and resources. This is very exciting for us!
The National Centre for Social Research (NatCen) tendered for and were selected to evaluate our project. We are learning a lot about, what for us is, a different research methodology.
The number of children positively impacted from this study is likely to be in the thousands, with several hundred adults to benefit from the free training. We look forward to working with the early years settings that sign up to the project.
