Analysis: Schools question need for the new Reception Baseline

• Children starting school are first to take the Reception Baseline Assessment since it became statutory
• DfE insists the Baseline is ‘not a test’, but many heads and teachers are opposed 

Thousands of four-year-olds who started school this term are among the first cohort legally required to take the Government’s new Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) in their first few weeks of joining.

The controversial RBA had been due to come into force last September but was postponed by the Department for Education to autumn 2021, due to the ‘challenging circumstances’ schools faced with the Covid pandemic.

While ministers expect the Baseline to be carried out with each child in the first six weeks of starting school in September, in practice many children will have taken it in their very first week because schools are not allowed to teach children before they take the assessment.

This contrasts with the way teachers typically assess Reception children during their first term in school, which is using ongoing ‘formative assessment’ to observe children, rather than the RBA’s specific one-to-one test in English and maths with a teacher using a computer.

The Government plans to use the information collected from the Baseline – which it states is not a test – to measure progress when children leave primary school in seven years’ time.

The DfE states that ‘no numerical score will be shared and the data will only be used at the end of Year 6 to form the school-level progress measure. However, teachers will receive a series of short, narrative statements that tell them how their pupils performed in the assessment. These can be used
to inform teaching within the first term.’

All schools with Reception classes were invited to take part as ‘early adopters’. DfE statistics show that 2,731 carried out assessments in the second half of the autumn term last year. Data gathered from last year will not be used to create a progress measure.

Schools we spoke to are continuing to use their own assessments, as well as the RBA, which they say is increasing their workload during a time when they remain under pressure from Covid, including through staff and pupil absence. 

Many heads, teachers, educators and parents have waged a long campaign against the introduction of the Baseline, with the latest a petition, organised by More Than A Score, containing 112,000 signatures, delivered to Downing Street on 23 September. 

Campaigners calculate that at least 300,000 teaching hours (or 60,000 school days) will be used to administer the assessment.

Teaching unions are divided, with the National Education Union continuing to call for the scrapping of the Baseline, while the National Association of Head Teachers (NAHT)’s backing of the RBA is dependent on the Government’s plan for it to replace Key Stage 1 SATs from 2022.

Paul Whiteman, NAHT general secretary, told Nursery World, ‘NAHT continues to offer cautious support for a baseline assessment at the start of school as an alternative to the current baseline for progress that takes place at the end of KS1. This support remains entirely contingent on KS1 statutory assessment being removed in order to reduce the volume of high-stakes testing in primary that NAHT has long called for.

‘It is important to reiterate that we remain committed to the principle that performance data alone should never be used to determine school effectiveness. We are also clear that there should be no attempts to set targets or make assumptions about pupil progress based on initial assessments.’

A DfE spokesperson said, ‘It is vital that children do not miss out on building important vocabulary and reading skills in their early education, despite
the challenges the pandemic
has presented. 

‘The Reception Baseline Assessment is not a test and there is not a pass mark. It is important to see the progress children make in primary school, and the measures enable the department to understand how well schools are supporting their progress.’

Heads’ response

Nursery World spoke to two head teachers about their experiences of the RBA. Both have on-site nurseries.

Dr Victoria Carr, head, Woodlands Primary, Cheshire

I think it’s utterly foolish of the Government to [be] going back to normal assessments as they were pre-Covid on the back of two disrupted years.

They are being told there is continued disruption with children and staff being ill and they are choosing to ignore that and to plough on regardless.

The efficacy and usefulness of the assessment data they will collect I would say is negligible.

In terms of early years, I definitely think it’s ridiculous to introduce a new baseline assessment now, that schools will be judged on in seven years’ time – again, on the back of some children never having been inside a school building or not having attended nursery in the last two years – it’s futile. Again, the data will be skewed.

What we should be spending our money on right now is good-quality support and good-quality interventions which are not being prioritised by the Government at all.

They are prioritising a testing regime with absolutely no thought or care about the impact of that on children or on schools. 

Schools all do their own baseline assessment in any case – they’ve worked perfectly well for years: ongoing formative assessment. We don’t wait until the children are in Year 6 to test them to see how we can judge the school against that, we’re constantly assessing children
for progress.

Staff have been assessing as much as they possibly can every single day since the first week of term, because until those assessments are done, no teaching can take place.

What we’d ordinarily do is assess the children very early on using whole-class phonics, we’d be teaching them songs. We’re not allowed to do that as that would be classed as teaching them phonics.

If you’ve got several staff who are off sick, your school is under so much pressure .We’ve had three children off in a year group and one staff member today.

They’ve also imposed drop-in check-ups to make sure tests are being done properly by the local authority.

These tests add no value to an experience of the child. If it had a positive impact on children, I’d endorse it. We’re assessing children regularly for their progress, that’s what matters.

Kulvarn Atwal, head of Highlands Primary School in Ilford and Uphall Primary in Redbridge

We would always conduct our own baseline assessments to enable us to understand
children’s starting points across all areas of the curriculum. 

We’re having to do assessments for external purposes which don’t impact on children’s learning experiences. 

In order for children to come into Reception to feel safe and settled, we do our best to undertake these baseline assessments as sensitively as possible without having to take away valuable learning time for the practitioners to build strong relationships with children.

They take time to complete, each one has to be done individually, and they’re not even used to support children’s learning. We do our own 

anyway, so this is taking up unnecessary time.

We are being told to do them as soon as possible. [So far] we’ve done them with the children that were with us in nursery last year. We’ve used an adult from nursery they’re familiar with. Then we’re doing them with children that have joined us from other settings, but only when they’re settled.

We have a staggered entry so not all children are in [every day yet], but we started in the first full week.

It can be to the advantage of the school to say their children have come in low, because the baseline is used for the progress of the school. We have 60 per cent mobility. Half of the children could have moved on to another school by the time they’re in Year 6.

These children have been through traumatic experiences in the last couple of years – and we think that the first thing they should do when they start school is to be formally assessed in numeracy and literacy?

Baseline tests are handled 'sensitively' at Highlands Primary

There are a lot of people hours to get these assessments completed – time that is taking away from what good early years practitioners want to do. It requires additional adults. 

We do our own starting point over the course of the first half-term, observing children and making notes,
not just putting them in front of a computer.

We have up to 80 per cent of children with English as an additional language. You’re not really measuring literacy skills, you’re measuring skills in English. So, for our school – with 40 different languages – it might look like our children have really accelerated in literacy, because you’re assessing a skillset that they’ve not had the opportunity to develop until they’ve come to school.

What does the Baseline involve?

The DfE says the RBA is a short activity-based assessment of pupils’ starting points in:

• language, communication and literacy
• mathematics

Pupils will use practical resources to complete these tasks and teachers will record the results on a laptop, computer or tablet.

Based on their experiences, Highlands Primary said that each assessment takes on average 20-25 minutes, a one-to-one with the teacher sitting with each child. The teacher looks at the screen and reads out the instruction to the child. The child is given any relevant resources (from the baseline pack) so that they can respond either verbally or using the resources (depending on the question). The teacher then records what the child was able to demonstrate on the system.

The school is carrying out assessments with four to five children per day (for approximately two- and-a-half hours). It takes around one week to complete a class.  The school has three Reception classes and four at Uphall Primary.