About our evidence

Evidence is a fundamental part of I CAN’s work.

It’s vital that our mission to help children develop speech, language and communications skills is based on evidence of what works.

So we draw on a vast academic research base from across the UK and the world to develop our programmes, interventions, projects and support.

And we rigorously evaluate all of our initiatives so that we know exactly what difference they make to children’s language and communication, their learning and behaviour, as well as to practitioners’ confidence and classroom practice.

Every time we pilot a new initiative we measure children and young people’s communication and language before and after a programme.

Then we analyse the information to assess the impact of our work.

We collect feedback during these pilots and use it to refine the programme before it is rolled out. We’ll also ask practitioners to tell us about their experiences of delivering the programmes so that we can build in their recommendations.

Once a programme is established we’ll continue to monitor it so that we can check on children’s progress.

We’ve created an online system that allows schools to record data before and after one of our programmes which is then analysed and automatically shared with them.

As a result we’ve built a database of ongoing impact that helps practitioners to keep track of children’s progress and helps them demonstrate to Ofsted, their leadership teams, governors and parents that our programmes deliver the impact we promise.