They are popular because they can be operated at low cost, and research demonstrates their impact can be significant.

Just last month James Heckman, a Nobel Prize winner, published his latest work, an evaluation of a simple home visiting programme operating in one of the poorest regions of China.

I thought it might be interesting to explore this programme because there is a lot we can learn from this that might benefit our own young families.

The programme was called China REACH and it was based on a well known programme operating in Jamaica.

In China, the programme was offered in a mountainous part of the country where 132,000 people live, around 114,600 of these have rural hukou (this is a form of household registration that defines and limits mobility within China).

Approximately 1500 children received support through the programme. Home visitors were employed from the community, so they had the same level of education and experience as had the mothers they were to visit. They received some training and then visited each family weekly.

In each weekly one-hour session they played with the child, offering developmentally appropriate learning games, and modelled ways to interact with the child to encourage learning.

Different protocols were developed for children of different ages, and the games and activities were designed to be culturally appropriate.

Overall, the curriculum offered more than 200 activities related to children's cognitive and language development, and around 20 activities targeting children's gross motor skill development.

Sometimes the home visitor would model interacting with the child on a task, and then have the parent try, so that they could provide support and feedback to the parent.

Parents were encouraged to continue the weekly activities between visits. During the visit the home visitor kept extensive records of what the child was able to do, and how the parent interacted with the child.

In total the programme employed 24 town supervisors and 91 home visitors, with each home visitor being responsible for around 8 families.

The supervisors were responsible for ensuring that the home visitors had prepared for the weekly visits, and provided professional supervision to help improve the performance of the home visitors.

The supervisors visited each family once a month with the home visitor to take observations of the visit to use not only for the evaluation, but to help the professional learning of the home visitor.

To demonstrate the effectiveness of the programme a randomised control trial protocol was developed.

This kind of evaluation is often considered the gold standard of evaluation science because it compares the progress of the children who received the programme against a matched sample of children who did not receive the programme.

In this case, villages in the area were matched on resident and village characteristics and assigned into matching pairs.

Then one village from each pair was randomly selected to receive the programme and the matched pair was thus the control group.

Statistical analyses demonstrated that language, cognitive, social-emotional and fine motor skills were significantly greater in the children who received the programme.

The improvements were greatest in the most disadvantaged households. Further statistical analyses indicated that the biggest contributor to this improved development was the changes in interaction patterns between home visitors and children and between home visitors and parents/caregivers.

While these findings are not new, (after all, we have known for many years that the way we interact with children and the kinds of learning opportunities we provide, make a huge difference to children's learning), the fact that this programme targeted such a large number of children, and was evaluated using the randomised control trial approach, makes the results sufficiently robust as to be a solid guide to policy.

The involvement of James Heckman also adds kudos to the evaluation given his status in the area. Whilst this paper does not provide evidence of cost (and Heckman is most likely to have a follow up paper sometime soon that does, given his profession as an economist), it does seem that the delivery costs are not exceedingly expensive.

Previous work by Heckman indicates that these kinds of improvements in children's development can have a significant impact on the long-term national economy: one of his studies suggested a 17:1 return on investment.