Baseline assessment – busting the ‘myth-busters'

 Children now in nurseries and pre-schools are to be the first group to sit the Government’s planned test for all four-year-olds as they enter Reception classes in September. As if they haven’t had enough disruption over the last year of pandemic– with family strains, limited opportunity to experience a vibrant social life, and attendance at nurseries patchy at best – they are now to be subjected to being taken aside and tested to find out how well they measure up as they start school.

Despite prolonged, evidenced opposition to the baseline test, the Government is determined to go ahead with a plan that would seem ridiculous to most people. Does it even remotely make sense that you can test every four-year-old in the country, and then use the outcome seven years later to find out how well schools have done?  Have a look at this video with comedian Zoe Lyons for a view into why you can’t reliably test four-year-olds.

The baseline idea is based on a mechanical, data-driven view of learning that assumes a school is like a factory: If we know the initial ingredients that go into the tin and then do a taste test at the end of the assembly line, we can find out if all the cooking processes were up to scratch.  But children are not baked beans to be put through a factory school.  Human beings, let alone the changes that will happen in children’s lives and in the schools themselves over a seven-year period, are much more complicated than that.

When schools minister recently introduced legislation to make baseline the law of the land, he wrote to all Conservative MPs to explain why it was happening and attached a ‘Factsheet’ as a myth-busting reply to the focussed criticisms of the scheme. Was this because MPs have been hearing from so many of their constituents who don’t want baseline to go ahead? Are they uncomfortably aware of the petition calling for it to be scrapped, nearing 100,000 signatures?

The ‘facts’ Nick Gibb put forward are a repetition of the myths the Government has used consistently, and which don’t bear scrutiny. For starters, the paper states that ‘we feel it is valid and reliable’ as a measure to judge school performance. Since when does a ‘feeling’ provide good enough evidence for statistical purposes? There is in fact no evidence of a useful statistical link between baseline data and school outcomes seven years later, nor that it will reflect quality of schooling. Children move schools, teachers and school leaders move schools. And wider factors in children’s lives in their families and society, as well as individual development patterns, may well have more impact than the school.

Being sensitive to criticism that we should not be testing such young children, the Government ‘facts’ insist that baseline assessment is ‘not a test of pupils’ knowledge’, and is ‘not about attainment’. Then what is it testing? It is precisely about children’s attainment in maths and English, including literacy.  Calling it a ‘snapshot of children’s starting points’ does not remove the fact that it is a test of knowledge in narrow curriculum areas.

The ‘factsheet’ attempts to present the baseline experience as a comfortable, even cosy, occasion.  It will be ‘covering material that many pupils will already be familiar with’. Yes, some will be familiar – depending on what they have previously been taught. But what about those children who have not had the same experiences at home or at nursery? Children do know that they are being tested, and being found wanting at the very beginning is not a good way to establish confidence in children’s views of school and of themselves. Children whose background experiences haven’t prepared them to answer the maths and English questions may have high levels of curiosity, motivation and persistence which will help them to make rapid progress in school – but the test can’t measure such things.

The burden of administering the test is written off as being carried out ‘in normal teaching time’. But it is far from normal for teachers to spend up to 20 hours in the crucial first weeks of school by taking children aside one-to-one to ask them structured questions. What will be the experience of the other 29 children in that time? How will the teacher find opportunities to really find out about children through observing them in their play and other activities – what they know and understand, how they relate to others, how they feel, what they are interested in?

The baseline ‘will provide valuable one-to-one time with each child, particularly during those important first weeks’, says Mr. Gibb. If running through test questions on a computer screen is the best way a school can help children build secure relationships with their teacher, it is a sad situation indeed.