The present investigation considers element block preconditioners for discretizations employing elements of high degree. Several different element block preconditioners are constructed and compared in numerical studies for a model elliptic problem. For regular grids a 2-level preconditioning scheme is found to work quite well. This consists of a local element preconditioner based on transformation of polynomial basis functions, combined with a simple global preconditioner such as Jacobi diagonal type preconditioning. For grids with non-constant coefficients or highly skewed grids, the block preconditioners described here can be applied instead of Jacobi preconditioning.