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

Lord Knight of Weymouth Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

[Lord Knight of Weymouth (Lab)]

My Lords, I remind you of my interests in respect of education, in particular that I am chair-elect of E-ACT academy group, which has a number of primary schools.

My understanding of the tests is that classroom teachers in reception will spend 20 to 30 minutes one to one with a child, who may be aged four years and a day, or four years and 364 days—which is a huge age range in relative terms, if you have been alive only that long—recording the answers to questions in respect of literacy and maths and so on that have been devised by the National Foundation for Educational Research. Teachers will record them as faithfully as they can, and the questions are adaptable, so they will change according to the answers given. If my understanding is incorrect, I would welcome the Minister letting me know.

I can see the temptation for Ministers to put a baseline at the beginning of primary in order to be able to measure the success of primary schools. Ministers in the past have been tempted; the Labour Government that I was a member of had a go at this, and it was withdrawn, and there was a pilot of this relatively recently, which was also withdrawn. In the end it is always withdrawn because it does not really work, so I am hugely sympathetic to the noble Lord, Lord Addington, and very supportive of my noble friend Lord Watson and his Motion.

If this was about child development, I could support the regulations because, like my noble friend, I believe in the importance of assessment as a fundamental part of teaching, but it must be assessment for learning. The problems always come when you redouble the use of that assessment for accountability. In this case, it is not being used for learning and child development at all. We are not measuring any of the physical, social and emotional aspects of a child; we are just measuring some of the cognitive ones as best we can, given the huge range of capability that children of that age have.

The results will not be shared with parents, nor really with teachers, and I do not really understand how that will work in data protection terms. Indeed, I think the Information Commissioner is still waiting to hear how withholding the results from parents will work in data protection terms. It is not at all about child development; it is solely about accountability. Can it work on that basis? Can it work with the variety of results that children of that age will be able to produce?

Given the very different experiences of preschool learning—especially in this coming year—and a decline in the numbers able to attend nursery education during Covid, I see huge variability in what we will get. You get children moving schools during the primary phase, because it is a long phase, and the more churn you have in the school environment the more the results and the accountability measure for the school will get skewed. I foresee that a head teacher who is cynical or anxious about accountability will want to pull in as many summer-born children as possible because they will come in low on the scores, so that they can maximise progress. I foresee that same anxious head teacher looking at children who want to come in after the baseline assessment has taken place and looking anxiously at whether they are likely to be under or over the baseline average for the school because that, in the end, will affect accountability.

Those issues are all really problematic. Then there are the issues of the data itself. The data will be recorded and will be relatively secret but, as I understand it, it will then link to the national pupil database. I would be interested to hear from the Minister how that and the fair processing regulations around data will work. I am afraid that the Department for Education does not have a very good record with the Information Commissioner on the handling of personal data. Quite a significant amount of personal data about children will be held. Can the Minister reassure those listening that that data will never be made available to commercial interests, about which there have been some questions asked of the Department for Education in the past? I am concerned about reliability.

I offer an alternative to the Minister, if she wants this sort of accountability school by school. You can use samples of tests; you can choose to sample a number of children in a school, which is cheaper and quicker. You are not taking teachers out of class for quite as long. If it takes 20 minutes—I cannot remember the maths—it becomes something like 10 hours of lost teacher time, right at the beginning of the school year, when it is most important to spend time getting a child socialised and used to being in school. You would lose less time if you did sampling. It would be cheaper and you would still have reasonable results, which would be just as reliable as the slightly dodgy, unreliable things that this test would produce.

As the noble Lord, Lord Addington, said, there are issues around SEND, special educational needs and disabilities, and whether they will properly be accounted for in the adaptive questioning that will be carried out, because you need quite high levels of adaptive questioning in the system as it is being designed.

From my point of view, I do not think this will work. If the Minister really believes that it can work, she or her department need to take time to look at this and answer some of the questions before bringing it in. September is definitely not a safe and reliable time to bring it in, so I urge her to listen to the Motion and, if it is pressed, I will support it.