Early Years Foundation Stage (Miscellaneous Amendments) and Childcare Fees (Amendment) Regulations 2021

Baroness Blower Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Baroness Blower (Lab)]

My Lords, it is pleasure to speak in the debate alongside my noble friend Lord Knight and the noble Lord, Lord Addington. As a former teacher, I can say categorically and without fear of contradiction that I am not anti- assessment, which is a central part of the teaching and learning process, but reception baseline assessment has very few friends and supporters. A teacher who engaged in an earlier iteration of this process described baseline assessment in no uncertain terms. She said it was unreliable, unethical, immoral and expensive, and that it should go once and for all. That is not the proposal before your Lordships’ House today, but it is worth considering why any early years professional should feel like this and how widespread that feeling is.

Is it unreliable? The British Educational Research Association, a highly regarded body, points out that assessing very young children—we are talking here about four year-olds, who have been locked down during this pandemic—is inherently unreliable. As the BERA report points out, any results would have

“little predictive power and dubious validity”.

Is it unethical? The reception baseline assessment is an accountability measure whose sole purpose is to judge the performance of schools. It is not to assist any child in any way at all. What is provided by the test is explicitly of no diagnostic value. They are to be used only as a cohort measure and the data will be used only at the end of year 6, as other noble Lords have said, to measure school-level progress. Yet, as other noble Lords have also said, over seven years a school cohort could change by up to 50%. Trying to reflect all the various changes accurately in any kind of algorithm could never really do so properly. Previous experience of the ill-fated and discredited algorithm for GCSEs demonstrates this. The current legislation also provides no information on the precise use to which the data will be put, other than that it will be entered on the national pupil database. Can the Minister expand beyond saying that it will be black-boxed?

Is it immoral? I am sure we all know that the first few days and weeks in a reception class are important for establishing, supporting, encouraging and nurturing relationships between children and their families and the team of early years professionals. But 69% of teachers involved in a 2019 pilot believed that the tests had had a negative impact on the settling-in period, which is not surprising when one realises that the teacher has to leave the classroom for 20 to 30 minutes at a time to conduct these tests with each child. For a class of 30, that could represent up to 15 hours of teaching time lost in those first important days of term.

However hard the teacher tries, though, according to University College London research, children know that they are being tested. This leads to some becoming anxious and feeling stressed, and to some possibly even feeling a sense of failure. That is a pretty inauspicious start to an education for any child.

Finally, is it expensive? My noble friend Lord Knight has already referred to the fact that if this were needed, we could do it much more cheaply by simply sampling. There is plenty of academic research on that being a suitable way of recording what cohorts can do. In my view, however, teacher time ought to be more highly valued than it is at present. I am sure it will be argued that the reception baseline assessment will reduce teacher workload, particularly in comparison with the early years foundation stage profile.

It is true that the early years foundation stage profile takes a lot of teacher time, but it is valuable teacher time productively spent. Frankly, any money spent on this reception baseline assessment system, which has attracted an open letter from 700 experts, educationists and parent groups describing the government plans as “pointless and damaging”, alongside an expert panel from BERA describing the assessment as

“flawed, unjustified and totally unfit for purpose”,

looks like a significant waste of resources, however much it is.

Research from University College London in 2020 showed that 86% of head teachers have negative opinions about reception baseline assessment, and research from More Than a Score, a campaigning organisation with which I have worked, found that 65% of parents are opposed to the testing of four year-olds as they start school. This should not be how children start the important lifelong learning journey on which they should engage. It is simply not appropriate.