Key takeaways:

- Alice Jones’ Background: Director of the Unit for School and Family Studies for eight years, Jones focuses on behavior, mental health, and social-emotional development. She has an extensive research portfolio with schools and organizations like the Nuffield Foundation, National Autistic Society, Mind, and the Department for Education. She serves as editor-in-chief of the *British Journal of Educational Psychology*, is a board member of the National Forum of Neuroscience, and was a script consultant for the drama series *Born to Kill*, focusing on psychopathic children.

- Storytelling’s Importance: Jones emphasizes storytelling as a fundamental human activity across cultures and time, vital for intergenerational knowledge transfer and engaging children’s attention, emotions, and imagination, making it a powerful tool for early learning.

- Cognitive and Language Benefits: Storytelling enhances narrative skills, predicting literacy outcomes at ages six and seven, alongside phonemic awareness and vocabulary. It promotes decontextualized talk—discussing abstract ideas, past, or future events—fostering higher-order thinking, long-term memory, and complex grammar (past, future, conditional tenses).

- Social-Emotional Development: Storytelling supports school readiness by providing a low-stakes environment where children can’t be “wrong,” promoting imagination, creativity, and confidence. It facilitates processing emotions, understanding others’ feelings, resolving conflicts, and building self-identity, especially for complex life events.

- Sustained Shared Thinking: Jones highlights storytelling’s role in sustained shared thinking, enabling dynamic, cooperative learning between adults and children. This aligns with Vygotskian models, supporting children’s cognitive and social-emotional growth through guided interaction.

- Tales Toolkit Evaluation: An evaluation of 460 children (ages 2–5) using Tales Toolkit versus 200 non-users showed significant gains in communication, language, personal-social-emotional development, literacy, and expressive arts/design by summer term, with effect sizes indicating three months’ developmental advantage. Boys’ literacy gaps closed by 62% in Tales Toolkit settings, unlike comparison settings where gaps widened.

- Inclusivity and Engagement: Tales Toolkit’s flexible, inclusive approach benefits children with additional needs, like autism or language difficulties, fostering ownership and pride in their stories. Teachers valued shared training and consistent classroom practices.

- Future Directions: Funded by the OVO Foundation, Jones and Tales Toolkit are developing resources to engage parents in storytelling at home, aiming to bridge school-home learning, especially for hard-to-reach parents, using simple, playful, non-intimidating methods to build family engagement and vocabulary.

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