Article by John Blake for Policy Exchange
Last Easter Monday, I appeared on Radio 4’s Today programme to
debate the motion passed by one wing of the National Education
Union at its annual conference which claimed that new assessments
the government plans to introduce for children starting school are
unnecessary and immoral. The union claims these tests will provide
no useful information to teachers, and they will make children
stressed.
Neither of these claims stack up. Rejecting the new baseline
assessments will actually mean less recognition of the
contribution of teachers in the early years make to their pupils’
education.
Provided the tests are well-constructed, they will provide valid
and useful data, which can help teachers target support at those
children who need a bit more support to get to the same level as
their peers. The purpose of the reception baseline is to
establish what children can do, in regards to English and
mathematics, when they start school. A 2007 comparison of
international studies provided evidence that early skills in a
child’s native language and maths—for example, being able to
identify what writing looks like, or being able to deploy the
concept of bigger and smaller—correlated with later academic
success.
No child should be stressed out by these assessments. The use of
the word “tests” might lead some to think that 4-year olds are
being asked to do homework to prepare for a written examination
that they pass or fail. This is entirely inaccurate: properly
conducted, children will not even know they are taking an
assessment at all—they will simply be spending a few minutes with
their teacher, answering some questions. They never need to be
told the result, and schools do not need to worry about the
outcomes—government has been clear it will not be published as a
judgement on the school (and, given the assessments will be
administered within six weeks of a child starting school, how
could they be?). Instead, the results will only be used to
compare to a child’s outcomes at the end of primary school, to
show which schools have helped children make the most progress,
and from that attempt to learn lessons across the system to
ensure more children can make good progress.
It is important to note that this measuring of progress is not
new. It happens in schools at the moment, but it is calculated by
comparing the results of tests taken at the end of primary
schooling to the results of assessments completed at the end of
Key Stage 1 (the end of Year 2 in primary schools). This means
that the work teachers are doing in Reception and Years 1 and 2
with children to help them learn is not formally recognised by
the assessment system, since there is no way of measuring whether
progress has been made. If the reception baseline assessments do
not go ahead, KS1 tests will not be removed.
The NEU argue that teachers can conduct observations for
themselves of their pupils in Reception and this sort of
assessment provides all the information necessary to identify
where progress is happening. But this is to load on teachers an
impossible burden: no single teacher can possibly make a
judgement about where a child’s development is compared to all of
their peer group, because they will not have assessed every other
child in that peer group.
Instead, teachers can only use the comparators they have: the
rest of the class, or previous classes they have taught, which is
nowhere near a sufficiently representative sample for them to
make these kinds of judgements. Research evidence
consistently shows that teacher assessment is unreliable, and
that this most often affects the outcomes of children from more
deprived backgrounds, thereby compounding their disadvantage—this
is not because teachers are bad people but because no one could
possibly do this reliably. There must be some form of
well-constructed and valid testing arrangement to ensure all
children can be fairly assessed and then usefully assisted to
improve.
Teachers should welcome a well-designed baseline test as an
efficient and effective way to make the accountability system for
schools better and fairer, for them and for their pupils. Some
might not hold their breath however, as the BBC’s Nick Robinson
pointed out to former NUT President Louise Regan on Today, her
union (now merged into the NEU) have opposed every new test that
Governments of all major parties have sought to introduce.
