Without prejudice?

Details of the performance of minority ethnic pupils in the Foundation Stage Profile assessments were published by the DfES earlier this year without any great publicity. Perhaps there should have been publicity - or rather, an alarm sounded. For they showed that all minority ethnic pupil groups, and black African Caribbean children in particular, performed below average on all 13 scales of the assessments completed at the end of the reception year.

When the document, Ethnicity and Education - the evidence on minority ethnic pupils was published in January, the DfES said that 'as 2003 is the first year such data are available, the results should be treated with a degree of caution and are no more than an indication of attainment'.

It added, 'The FSP is based on ongoing teacher/practitioner observation of children's learning. Teachers received limited and variable training and the moderation of results between LEAs was patchy. In addition, some of the data was of poor quality and completeness.'

The note of caution has been echoed by practitioners in the field.But leading academic David Gillborn of the London Institute of Education believes the results are cause for deep concern, especially in the light of the previously high achievement of black pupils in the baseline assessments the Foundation Stage Profile replaced.

In 2000, with Professor Heidi Mirza, Professor Gillborn challenged the notion that black pupils performed poorly as they entered primary school and found that 'in some parts of the country, black students tended to do better than white kids in the baseline assessments'.

He now says, 'That has passed into received wisdom and is quoted in textbooks and by politicians. Yet the analysis of the Foundation Stage Profile contradicts that and has all minority ethnic groups doing less well on all the scales. But it simply reports it and makes it sound more like continuity. It states, "Patterns of achievement for minority ethnic groups in Early Learning Goals would appear to broadly mirror attainment gaps at older ages." It doesn't ask, what's going on here?'

He argues, 'This is an example of a deeper process, as questions of race equality are simply not part of the mainstream of education policy.' He claims that studies done in both the UK and the US have shown that 'when white teachers are asked to assess the achievements of black pupils, they tend to put disproportionate numbers of them in the lower group'.

Professor Gillborn, who presented a paper on the subject to the recent British Educational Research Association's annual conference at Glamorgan University, adds, 'If white students had done badly it would have been literally inconceivable that the assessments would have been accepted in a matter-of-fact way. But when it comes to minority ethnic pupils, it is acceptable.'

Comparing assessments

Not surprisingly, Professor Gillborn's conclusions have proved controversial, with practitioners reluctant to tar teachers with the racist brush, unconscious or not, and the DfES anxious to point out that comparing baseline assessments with the Foundation Stage Profile is misjudged.

A DfES spokesman says, 'The original baseline assessments that Professor Gilborn refers to are from six local authorities and from a time when there was no national system or system for moderation. Those figures cannot be compared with the figures published earlier this year, which were national and moderated. A key principle of the Foundation Stage is that no child should be disadvantaged because of ethnicity, culture or religion, home language, family background, special educational needs, disability, gender or ability.'

However, Gina Houston, vice-chair of Early Years Equality, supports his view that an element of stereotyping affects black pupil's achievement.

She says, 'I don't think it's the Foundation Stage curriculum itself, but the way children are being assessed. Some of the methods Foundation Stage practitioners are using are actually not suitable for all children. That is particularly so when children are not used to the culture and are not speaking English at home.'

Marion Dowling, president of Early Education, shares the DfES's view that the results of the profile assessments should be treated with caution as the profile was introduced rapidly and teachers were expected to 'get their heads round it very quickly'.

She also suggests that children, especially those with English as an additional language, may find the transition into school difficult and 'may not be seen to make great progress across the Foundation Stage', but rejects any assumption that this points to teacher prejudice.

Early years specialist Margaret Edgington says that a greater problem can be that boys, especially those who are very active and boisterous, tend to find reception class 'not very suitable for their learning style'. She explains, 'I don't think the assessments favour boys. If they are particularly physical and their knowledge of the world is good, they can't score as many points on those areas as on others such as communication, language and literacy, where they develop more slowly than girls. Boys need a really strong outdoor curriculum devised in a way that suits them best.'

Time for embedding

Chris Davis, chair of the National Primary Headteachers' Association, points to differences between the baseline assessment and its emphasis on what children could do, and the Foundation Stage Profile which 'deals with their attitude, their willingness to work and get on with things'.

Given this mismatch between the two forms of assessment, he thinks there is a need for 'controlled evidence' which will not emerge until the Foundation Stage profile has been given time to become embedded after four or five years. 'Then we will have comparable data and conclusions can be drawn,' he says.

Equally, he emphasises the difference in timing of the assessments - the baseline was done in the first few weeks after a child started at school, while the Foundation Stage profile is completed at the end of the reception year. 'That means there can be as much as ten months difference, and children change enormously in that time,' he says.

It's a view shared by Jan Hardy, head of inclusion and pupil progress at Hertfordshire County Council, who says, 'In any reception year you are going to have a variation in age of up to a year, which constitutes almost a third of their lives.'

Professor Gillborn says that while some practitioners point to the difference in timing of the two forms of assessment to deny claims of prejudice, other practitioners have confirmed to him that 'this deterioration sets in very quickly in the reception year'.

The difficulty of drawing conclusions from Foundation Stage profiles appear to be recognised by Ofsted, which does not use prior attainment as a baseline against which to measure a school's performance at Key Stage 1.

The inspection body compares Key Stage 1 results in one school against those schools with similar numbers of pupils receiving free school meals.

Teacher training

Mr Hardy is puzzled by the apparent dip in performance among black pupils at the Foundation Stage, adding, 'I don't quite understand how this stands alongside the conventional data which I have seen in my own authority which is that African Caribbean children do very well at Key Stage 1.'

Margaret Edgington says she doubts whether all reception classes are working 'fully in line with Foundation Stage practice'. She adds, 'I hope that teachers are monitoring carefully the FSP scores in their own schools and if they are seeing that groups of children are doing less well than others, that they are thinking about their practice and finding ways of rectifying that as soon as possible to eliminate any possible stereotyping.'

Professor Gillborn says, 'Education policy needs to start taking race equality seriously. All maintained schools are supposed to monitor what they do. Teachers need to be aware of the race equality dimension. If at the end of the reception year they are convinced that every ethnic minority group is doing less well than white children, then serious attention needs to be paid to teacher training, resources and the curriculum. If this does not happen, race inequality in education will get a lot worse, threatening to institutionalise it even more than previously.'

The DfES, which emphasises that Foundation Stage practitioners are obliged to develop an environment free from stereotypical images and discriminatory practice, says that it will be important in future to compare this first year of nationally moderated data with data from assessments over the coming years. Only then will we see whether Professor Gillborn's analysis is vindicated.