Levelling The Playing Field

Schools should welcome the baseline assessment, but it should not be used to predict the destinies of individual children, says Russell Hobby...

Tests for four year olds: is this not the epitome of ‘too much too young’? Is it another example of the erosion of childhood and an obsession with measurement? Despite my natural suspicion of testing in primary schools, I actually don’t buy this line.

My main argument is as follows. We should measure schools on the progress they make; this is the only way to properly value those people who choose to work in the most challenging schools. If you are going to measure progress, you need a start measure and an end measure. At the moment, in primary, we take our start measure at the age of seven. This is somewhat puzzling to me, as I am sure children usually start school earlier than this! Indeed, measuring progress from seven to eleven ignores three of the most important years of a child’s education. It is in reception and KS1 that those schools serving challenging and deprived communities make their most important investments and begin reversing the gaps already emerging. By neglecting this phase, we place schools on an uneven playing field from the start: there are schools where some children arrive able to read and there are schools where some children arrive in nappies and barely able to speak. Should we not take this into account when assessing how well a school performs?

Now, you can argue that we should not use assessments at all at primary school, or that we should not hold schools to account. This is a coherent position, but I don’t see it gaining traction any time soon. In the meantime, we can do the most practical good by arguing for the best and least distorting measures.

A reception baseline will more fairly measure the performance of schools and reward those who work where they are most needed. This is good for schools, but what about the impact on children? There are three common concerns:

Will we get hot-housing to pass these assessments? It would be mad for a school to coach children or apply pressure for them to do better than they should in the baseline. I would have thought the opposite outcome was a greater risk. Will it be an unpleasant experience for children? Diverting as it is to envisage a group of four year olds in an exam hall, turning over their papers at the start of the clock, nobody is seriously proposing this. Schools are being offered a choice of baseline assessments, and each of these needs to be teacher-led and teacher-administered. There is no reason this can’t be made fun and low key.

Does it erode childhood? The erosion of childhood through formal teaching methods and curriculums is worthy of debate, but is a separate issue from when assessment should take place. My view is that a baseline should be taken when children start school. The right age to start school is a different matter. Nor does the concept of a baseline imply a view on what the curriculum should be post-baseline; although, to be fair, the nature of the assessment will send messages about priorities. We should certainly work to ensure that we ‘baseline’ emotional, social, physical and cognitive development.

A more worrying objection to baseline assessment in reception is as follows: somewhere in the DfE there are, no doubt, statisticians who are eagerly waiting to predict a child’s GCSE results from their score at four. This is antithetical to everything education should stand for – which is about confounding and beating predictions rather than blindly following them. There is no way that the individual results of a single assessment of a four year old can be accurate enough to make such life-changing predictions, and yet the danger is they become self-fulfilling prophecies.

I believe, therefore, that the reception baseline should produce an official cohort level measure only. This is a measure of the challenge a school as a whole faces; it should not be used to guess at the destinies of individual children. If it weren’t such a terrible waste of diagnostic and formative information for the school, I’d go so far as to suggest that, when the class average is generated, we throw away the individual results. But let’s only record the collective results for official purposes.

There’s plenty to doubt in terms of practicality. How will multiple baselines work – will we not just repeat the problems faced by exam boards, only in the opposite direction? How long will it be before this data becomes useful and the system settles down again? What about schools where the cohort is very small? These are all legitimate concerns but the basic idea seems to be of value from the school’s perspective and benign from the child’s.

About the author

Russell Hobby is the general secretary of NAHT, the National Association of Head Teachers.