“A baseline without basis”: New report challenges the validity and utility of the proposed reception baseline assessment in England

A new report from an expert panel convened by the British Educational Research Association (BERA) sets out the case against the government’s proposal to use a baseline assessment test of pupils in reception to hold schools in England to account for the progress that pupils have made at the end of key stage 2.

The panel concludes that the government’s proposals - which will cost upward of £10 million -  are flawed, unjustified, and wholly unfit for purpose. They would be detrimental to children, parents, teachers, and the wider education system in England.

The expert panel considered whether the evidence from the assessment literature could justify such a test being used for this purpose.  They concluded that it could not. 

In the panel’s view the proposed baseline assessment will not lead to accurate or fair comparisons being made between schools because:

• Any value-added calculations that will be used to hold school to account will be highly unreliable.
• Children will be exposed to tests that will offer no formative help in establishing their needs and/or in developing teaching strategies capable of meeting them.
• This is an untried experiment that cannot be properly evaluated until at least 2027, when the first cohort tested at reception has taken key stage 2 tests.

Gemma Moss, the chair of the panel and a former BERA President, said “It is both ethically and methodologically questionable to use reception baseline assessment (RBA) for school accountability. As currently proposed, RBA is likely to produce results with little predictive power and dubious validity while the assessment of very young children is hard to justify when it is not being used to support a child's learning.”

The panel argues that the tests cannot be accurate or fair because 

• just a few month's difference in age in the early years produces pronounced developmental differences, yet plans for the RBA do not take this properly into account 
• Pupil cohorts within primary schools are statistically small, and often have uneven distributions of younger and older children. This makes it hard to draw valid comparisons between schools.
• Pupil mobility, teacher turnover, and the likelihood of a change in head teacher will all muddy the issue of accountability – either pupil data will be missing, or schools may be held to account for pupils they have not taught continuously in the seven years since the data was first collected 
• It is widely recognised that a range of contextual factors – such as parents’ educational levels, family income and having English as an additional language – affect both attainment and relative attainment. However, under the government's current proposals, no such contextual factors will be taken into account when making comparisons between schools. This approach cannot be fair or useful.

The results of the RBA will do little to help secure positive outcomes for pupils, teachers or parents in either the short or longer term.

The panel comment: “The government intends to hold the reception baseline data for seven whole years with few plans for any release before the end of key stage 2. Given this, teachers and parents may rightly ask, ‘Why administer a test that doesn’t help teaching and learning?’ 

This may indeed stoke resentment at the costs of development and administration – estimated to be £10 million pounds - at a time of considerable budget reductions in most schools.”

By contrast the panel favour “an ‘intelligent accountability’ approach.  Instead of being predicated on measuring performance for its own sake, this would allow practitioners to use their professional judgement more fully in the assessment process “gathering deeper and more meaningful data that can take account of contextual factors, help to support individual pupils, and inform improvement planning both within and between schools.”

Notes to editors

• The British Educational Research Association (BERA) is the home of educational research in the United Kingdom. We are a membership association committed to advancing knowledge of education by sustaining a strong and high quality educational research community. Together with our members, BERA is working to: 

• advance research quality 
• build research capacity 
• foster research engagement. 

• BERA established the expert panel in response to government’s plans published earlier in 2018.

• The expert panel consists of Harvey Goldstein, Gemma Moss, Pamela Sammons, Gwen Sinnott and Gordon Stobart. 

• Harvey Goldstein is Professor of Social Statistics at Bristol University, and a fellow of the British Academy. He has extensive experience of analysing educational data. 
• Gemma Moss is the former President of the British Educational Research Association (BERA), and is Director of the International Literacy Centre and Professor of Literacy at the UCL Institute of Education. 
• Pamela Sammons is Professor of Education at the Department of Education, University of Oxford, and a Senior Research Fellow at Jesus College, Oxford. She is internationally known for her research on equity, educational effectiveness and improvement. 
• Gwen Sinnott is an independent education performance consultant with extensive experience of working with education achievement data to support school improvement at local authority level, and with school leaders directly. She owns and runs SINNOTT Learning Solutions, and is the former head of management information and analysis at Southwark children’s services and past president of London Education Research Network. 
• Gordon Stobart is Emeritus Professor of Education at UCL, Institute of Education and Honorary Research Fellow at the Oxford University Centre for Educational Assessment (OUCEA). He is well known as a policy researcher with internationally recognised expertise in assessment.

For further information please see the full report (link active from Wednesday 4^th July):

https://www.bera.ac.uk/researchers-resources/publications/a-baseline-without-basis