“A waste of time”, “exhausting”, “another difficult task to juggle”, “pointless”...

These are some of the choice words used by a variety of early years teachers to describe the experience of running the new reception baseline assessment (RBA).

This is not how it was supposed to be.

The RBA, delayed from its planned launch in September 2020 by the pandemic, has been championed by the Department for Education (DfE) as a necessary change to ensure the full impact of a school’s teaching on a pupil across their time in primary education is measured. 

To do this, a short series of questions are put to pupils by teachers in a one-to-one set-up that is meant to be as relaxed and informal as possible.

There is no pass or fail for pupils, or a score for pupils, and the data is instead held by the DfE to be used in seven years’ time, when it can be compared to Sats outcomes to measure the impact a school made on a child’s learning.

Watch below: The Reception Baseline Assessment explained

Real-world complications 

This may seem logical in the lofty rooms of Whitehall but the experience of those teachers grappling with the RBA in real-world conditions suggests asking children as young as four to take a test - however it is done - is not straightforward and is fraught with issues.

The first issue that many have encountered is the sheer time it takes to understand and the implement the RBA, as the experience of Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Bedhampton, Hampshire, outlines.

“We have needed to allocate additional time for staff to be trained, and to sit together as a team looking at the materials and going through the guidance in readiness to carry out the assessments,” she said.

“We also realised the RBA would be quite demanding on children in terms of concentration, so we felt it could only really be administered by setting up in a quiet room outside of the classroom, away from distractions. 

“This has meant sourcing additional teaching cover for the week to release the staff and negotiating the use of a room in the school.”

This has all been achieved - it’s a statutory requirement after all - but given how important the start of term is for young pupils, it has felt like an unnecessary complication.

“The timing of needing to carry out baseline at the beginning of term isn’t ideal. We are trying to settle new children, organise home visits and adjust to a new EYFS curriculum,” she adds.

Indeed, she admits, most staff have seen it as something to get over and done with, and that it has felt like they are “being taken away from their classes” to carry it out.

“Staff would much rather have the time to assess the children in a natural scenario, as they play in their class environment, and to be building relationships, teaching routines and reassuring children through the first few weeks of school,” she adds.

Guessing or knowing?

Still, the government would argue that this is worth it because the test is all about being able to see the true impact of education on a child throughout their time in primary education - not just from key stage 1 to KS2 Sats.

Pinnington is dubious, though, that testing children so young really has any merit. She notes, for example, that their engagement with the test appeared hugely variable and she does not believe it reveals a meaningful insight into their actual learning level.

“It is a pretty inconsistent assessment because of children’s immaturity, playfulness, stamina, emotional levels,” she says.

“For example, some of the answers require children to point to a picture in which they have an opportunity to guess the answer - and some did. 

“This is misleading on a narrative report because it will state something like ‘Bob can identify initial sounds’ when, actually, he just guessed for that particular question.”

This is a point that Alice Edgington, head of school at St Stephen’s Infant School in Canterbury, raises too, having recently started the RBA. “Some questions have a one-in-three chance of guessing the right answer, so it’s hard to know how accurate or reliable it is.”

She also queries the rationale for the routing element of the test, whereby children’s answers are meant to guide them to questions more suited to their level.

“Children can know something in one area and not so much in another, so the adjustments may not really work for all children,” she adds.

The forgotten schools 

The fact that Edgington works in an infant school also raises an interesting issue. What happens to the data when a pupil leaves the school where they sat the RBA to another where they will take the Sats - be that at a junior school or to a different primary school?

After all, the RBA data is sent to the government to be stored to then be compared against Sats outcomes so that a “cohort-level insight” from the start to the end of primary can be created, as clearly articulated by the Standards and Testing Agency document on the RBA: “The purpose of the reception baseline assessment is to provide an on-entry assessment of pupil attainment to be used as a starting point from which a cohort-level progress measure to the end of key stage 2 can be created.”

However, as Mark Chatley, the trust leader at Coppice Primary Partnership in Kent, notes: “From a data point of view, this raises so many questions” around how pupils in the above scenario are measured.

“There will be completely different measures for different schools, which is going to be contentious. If junior schools aren’t going to be measured for progress with baseline data, what does that mean for children who move schools part way through their journey?

“Does the school that carried out the RBA hold that data to create an average or does the individual data move with the child, in which case, could this also be the case for junior schools?”

Michael Tidd, headteacher at East Preston Junior School, in West Sussex, concurs that it is a confusing situation.

To him, it undermines the wider purpose of the RBA in primary schools, too: “If you don’t have a way of measuring for the impact between infant and junior schools or middle schools, and that is seen as not a problem, then it could be seen as suggesting that having a measure for primary is also unnecessary,” he says.

Tes contacted the Department for Education for a response to this issue regarding infant and junior schools, and pupils who move school, but simply received a general response about the wider purpose of the RBA: “It is important to see the progress children make in primary school, and the measures enable the department to understand how well schools are supporting their progress.”

This does not address the concern and, so far, it remains unclear how this situation will be resolved. Perhaps the DfE’s saving grace is that it has six years, before the children taking the RBA reach their Sats, in which to work something out.

Time lost with pupils 

Many, though, will be hoping that the RBA is long gone before then, not least the 112,000 supporters of a petition organised by campaign group, More Than a Score, calling for an end to the current system of primary assessments.

One of those involved in the campaign is Kulvarn Atwal, the executive headteacher of two large primary schools in the London Borough of Redbridge.

He told Tes that one of his main concerns is that, because the data is not shared with schools, there are no benefits to teachers or children.

“The tests are so unnecessary, not least because the reasons for doing it are nothing to do with helping a child’s learning - it’s all to do with judging schools at some point in the future.”

He, too, adds that the time and effort to carry out the RBA has been substantial and taken valuable time away from teachers that they could have been using to get to know their pupils.

“It’s taking around 30 minutes per child and we can do about five children a day, That means it’s a week to do an entire class and we have seven classes across our two schools.”

Not only this but the fact that the RBA must also be completed within the first six weeks of term means teachers are forced to spend a lot less time with their pupils at the very moment when they would most like to be getting to know them, as Chatley outlines.

“The teachers are frustrated because they are away from their whole class for the time that they are doing the baseline,” he said.

“At a time when they want to be setting up routines, expectations and getting to know the children’s personalities, likes and dislikes, and prior knowledge/experience in areas covered in the Early Years Curriculum (mainly the prime areas of learning), they are away with one child.”

And not only that but you can’t even help or engage with that child in any meaningful way, as primary headteacher Amanda Wilson, explains.

“There are several different activities to go through and there is a script you need to follow that you can’t deviate from or modify your language to support the needs of the child.”

Given this inability to engage with the children - potentially at a time when they are most in need of a teacher’s guidance and reassurance - Wilson echoes Atwal’s point that it is frustrating that so much time is being taken up by something that appears to have no benefit to teacher or pupil: “It’s not informing practice or changing the way we do things, or being able to say ‘this child is able to do X, Y, Z or needs more on this area’, it’s just an expensive use of time within a school for something that is just another metric for government.”

In fact, all the teachers here say that, because of this, they are still carrying out their usual assessments of a child on arrival alongside the RBA, effectively doubling staff workloads, as Pinnington explains: “[The RBA] is most certainly not reliable enough as a stand-alone assessment and so, as a team, we will be supplementing the test with our own play-based tasks and observational assessments through play over the next few weeks.”

Atwal says his staff are in the same situation: “We are still doing our normal assessments as, with the RBA, we don’t get any insights on how the children did or strategies to develop with them.”

Where next?

Overall, it seems clear that the RBA has not had the most welcome arrival on to the education landscape.

Then again, few new ideas or initiatives arrive to a great fanfare - especially if they cause extra work on top of already high demands faced by teachers.

Perhaps as it becomes embedded in the years ahead, it will become less onerous and more accepted as just “one of those things” that teachers have to slot into their already heavy workloads.

Or, alternatively - with a new set of head honchos in the DfE keen to make a mark - perhaps we will see the RBA quietly consigned to the dustbin of history alongside other short-lived teaching policy ideas, such as Brain Gym or Assessing Pupils’ Progress.

If that did happen, it seems not many would weep for its demise.