After five years of successful delivery of Blocks 4 Growth (B4G), an Early Childhood Development (ECD) therapeutic programme developed by TLI to promote holistic child development for 4- to 5-year-olds, TLI expanded its programme offering in 2021 by launching Step Up (SU) for 5- to 6-year-olds. The new programme’s key objective is to better prepare Grade R’s for optimal functioning in Grade 1. SU was rolled out in Cape Town at 9 sites across 4 communities.
To quantify the developmental progress enabled by the respective programmes, standardised, validated tools were used. For SU, the International Development and Early Learning Assessment (IDELA) was used to measure programmatic impact, whereas the Early Learning Outcomes Measure (ELOM) remained the key metric for B4G’s programmatic evaluation.