This article was originally published on 14 February 2024

“Can I go now?”

It’s a plea that teachers have heard from children midway through the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) - a test that some feel stretches the concentration powers of four- and five-year-olds to the limit.

The statutory assessment, which must be carried out within six weeks of pupils starting Reception at schools in England, was only introduced by the Department for Education in September 2021. But some school leaders - many of whom voiced opposition to the RBA during a pilot - would already quite like to ask the government if they, too, can opt out.

The answer from the DfE would be “certainly not”. The department is using the RBA results to create school-level progress measures for all-through primary schools, looking at the progress pupils make between entry to Reception and the end of key stage 2, with the first results to be published in 2028.

A DfE spokesperson bills the RBA as “a short, interactive and practical assessment that takes around 15 minutes, covering early mathematics, language, literacy and communication”. In other words, it’s not the sort of observational assessment favoured by many early years practitioners.

The results of the tests are not shared in full with schools but are instead “black boxed” for the DfE’s use - a feature that has left some leaders questioning the value of an assessment that takes up staff time but delivers no discernible classroom benefit.

Many have pointed out that schools have to carry on conducting their own internal baseline assessments to inform teaching, in addition to the RBA.

Those unhappy with the assessment might hope that Labour’s proposed review of early years provision in England - set to be chaired by Sir David Bell, a former Ofsted chief inspector and Department for Education permanent secretary - could lead to the RBA being scrapped, if the party comes to power.

But with the future of the RBA potentially already up for debate, what has the experience of running it been like for schools? And what, if anything, has its rollout taught us about assessing progress in the early years?

Reception Baseline Assessment: what is going wrong?

For some, the biggest takeaway from the first years of the RBA is that concerns raised in the pilot scheme have not been addressed.

Early years leaders and staff “don’t see [the RBA] as useful, feel it’s not giving them useful information; it’s taking up time they want to be spending directly with children,” says Beatrice Merrick, chief executive of Early Education, the charity and professional membership organisation for UK early years practitioners and providers.

The assessment is supposed to be short: it should take less than 20 minutes to administer, according to the DfE. But once you add in time for setting up (the test involves resources for exercises like counting plastic bears), you are “probably talking at least 30 to 40 minutes per child”, says Merrick. “Then multiply that by the number of children you have: you can easily end up with a week of teacher time being taken up doing the assessment.”

This is particularly problematic because the time in which the RBA must be taken - the first six weeks of Reception - is a crucial period, as staff look to form relationships during the first days of school and explain to children expectations around routines and behaviour.

“A key area of feedback from teachers is that the [RBA] is problematic to administer,” says Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Bedhampton, Hampshire. “You need to allocate time one-to-one with every child, which is so difficult when the children are settling in and without funding to pay for supply. It takes a long time to get through the whole class and tends to drag out over the initial weeks.”

This early time in Reception has become even more crucial since the pandemic, with more children arriving at school with acute additional needs, from language difficulties through to not being toilet trained.

“You can easily end up with a week of teacher time being taken up doing the assessment”

Instead of being able to focus on that work, early years teachers and leaders are “having to take a member of staff out of the classroom to go and do this baseline assessment, which they don’t actually get the data for”, says Ruth Swailes, a former primary headteacher and former Ofsted inspector, now a school improvement adviser and consultant specialising in the early years.

Even without the RBA, staff workload is a big issue in the early years - as well as ongoing observational assessment for internal school purposes, there’s also a need for observational assessment to build the end-of-year Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) Profile required by the DfE for each child.

With the RBA now in place, Reception is the only year of the English school system with two forms of statutory assessment.

The DfE would argue that the introduction of the RBA has enabled it to make end-of-KS1 assessments non-statutory from this academic year, thus reducing overall statutory assessment requirements on schools.

Nevertheless, some have concerns that the nature of the RBA could mean it is failing to measure ability accurately.

“The test itself is a bit dull and lots of children lose concentration midway through, although there is the option to pause it and carry it out over two sessions,” says Pinnington. “A lot of the time the children begin to ask, ‘Can I go now?’ It stretches beyond their limit of concentration, so I know that we are not always seeing the best engagement or focus.”

There are also frustrations around the scripted nature of the assessment preventing staff from rephrasing questions, she adds.

“I have seen some children unable to answer the maths questions in the test itself, and then go on to later show me that they have competence in the exact same skill as they engage in play in the classroom in a more comfortable context,” Pinnington says.

These problems are exacerbated for children with English as an additional language, or with special educational needs and disabilities, says Swailes, who points out that although the RBA is “supposed to be an inclusive assessment”, it is “particularly problematic” for both those groups.

“Children aren’t daft. They are aware if they are finding something really tricky and someone is asking them something in a language they don’t understand or asking them to follow instructions they don’t understand. That can be quite distressing,” she says.

In terms of the language and communication skills being assessed by the RBA, the DfE has prioritised the teaching of these skills in Reception via its £17 million Nuffield Early Language Intervention (NELI), which it describes as “raising outcomes in Reception-age children’s early language, communication and speech skills - particularly for those who need the most support to overcome the disruption of the pandemic”.

But do the RBA and NELI work against each other? Merrick fears schools are being asked to do small-group language teaching via NELI only for the baseline assessment to interrupt this.

“We mustn’t say [the RBA] doesn’t do any harm [to children] because it really is taking time away from children when they need it,” she says.

Others, though, see value in the information that the RBA provides.

Does the RBA produce valuable information?

Conducting the RBA is “very time-consuming and it does take time away from staff-pupil relationships”, agrees Tilly Browne, co-headteacher of primary at Reach Academy Feltham.

However, “there is value in practitioners sitting down with children one-on-one to really find out what they can and can’t do”, particularly because unconscious bias around factors such as children’s ethnicity can come into play when looking at baselines “through your own interactions”, she adds.

For example, one teacher told Browne about a particular child: “I assumed she could count to five; she couldn’t. And if I hadn’t done [the RBA], I wouldn’t have known that.”

But what about the “black boxing”, whereby results are meant for the DfE’s eyes only? That’s not working out as planned, says Guy Roberts-Holmes, professor of early childhood education at the UCL Institute of Education.

“When I’d been to a couple of primary schools I was absolutely gobsmacked because I was asking these teachers, ‘How did RBA go?’ Then they got out their notebooks and they said, ‘Here are the results,’” he says.

Teachers told him that “it was helpful to find out that so and so had no phonics, so we put them in the low-ability group, because the RBA had confirmed this was the case,” he recalls. Some teachers, he adds, had “worked out an incredibly complex system” for keeping a tally of scores in the RBA.

Given that schools “want some sense of where that child is”, it is “inevitable” that some will try to do their own “second-guessing” of the RBA scores, says James Pembroke, founder of Sig+, an independent school data consultancy.

“There is value in practitioners sitting down with children one-on-one to really find out what they can do”

But what those schools are doing, he notes, is compiling a raw score without the weighting that the DfE will apply - so the score schools are calculating for each child is not the score the DfE will assign.

Those raw scores also don’t take into account the “routing” used in the assessment.

In the words of the DfE’s RBA framework, published in 2020, the assessment “includes carefully designed routing, the number of marks presented will vary from pupil to pupil. Routing helps to prevent pupils from being presented with too many activities in which they are unlikely to be successful.”

While “all pupils are presented with activities worth at least 22 marks”, it “should be noted that not all pupils will do exactly the same assessment due to the application of routing rules, which means that the demands of the assessment will be different for different pupils”, the framework adds.

Roberts-Holmes, alongside UCL graduate Lucy Kaufmann, published an Institute of Education blog post in which they argued that this amounts to an RBA “algorithm” that “separates children based on their responses, creating differential assessment pathways and resultant scores determined by an algorithmic interpretation of ‘ability’”.

The fact that some schools are keeping their own - inaccurate - tallies of scores on the assessment only accentuates their concerns about some children being shepherded into a low-achieving corral by the RBA.

Schools calculating their own scores

Schools that are calculating their own scores will be “using that to confirm the low placement or high placement in an ability group,” says Roberts-Holmes. “It’s further embedding, through algorithmic authority, notions that some children have got it at the age of 4 and other children haven’t.”

“There’s already an issue that setting and streaming is started far too early,” says Merrick. “[The RBA] is another thing that’s pushing schools to think about setting and streaming.”

This is perhaps particularly troubling when you consider all the things that an RBA focused on literacy and maths isn’t assessing, points out Swailes.

The focus of the RBA is narrower than the EYFS Profile; self-regulation, executive function, disposition and attitudes are among the crucial aspects of children’s development not being assessed by the RBA, Swailes observes. “They are really strong indicators of how children are going to do in the long term,” she adds.

During development of the RBA the DfE rejected an observational alternative, EExBA, developed by Early Excellence, which had a broader focus, instead favouring a model developed by the National Foundation for Educational Research.

Should we scrap the RBA?

This all might leave some asking: wouldn’t it be better to just drop the RBA?

After all, schools are “doing another assessment that is not really of any use to [them] and is probably not going to be much use to the government either,” says Swailes.

“I predict that it will go,” she says, once there is widespread realisation “that there’s very little correlation between what people get at KS2 and what people get in baseline”.

The only outcome is for the DfE to “put all this on a website for parents to choose schools”, says Roberts-Holmes. “So it’s part of the schools market. As far as I can see, that’s the only point of it.”

But others see potential value in the progress score being built. Browne, for instance, says that if given the choice of scrapping or keeping the RBA, she wouldn’t get rid of it.

“EYFS has been calling out to be taken seriously for a long time and I think it is a disservice to the practitioners that they haven’t been involved in the progress measure when so many children make so much progress in [Reception],” she says. “It will be helpful that that can be measured.”

Which is the point made by the DfE. A department spokesperson says the RBA “is essential for building a fairer progress measure for primary schools”.

“Data from the RBA will enable us to give schools credit for the progress they help pupils make throughout the whole of their time in primary school, including in the first three years,” the spokesperson adds.

“It’s not really of any use to schools and is probably not going to be much use to the government either”

However, Pembroke highlights that DfE progress measures between the RBA and KS2 will only be built for all-through primary schools teaching between those points - not for infant, first, middle or junior schools. That exempts, he says, around 20 per cent of schools teaching primary-age children.

The DfE said in 2019 that these schools “will have responsibility for evidencing progress based on their own assessment information”.

That, says Pembroke, raises the question: “Why are we going through this?”

“If it’s OK for those schools [not subject to the progress measure] to demonstrate the progress children make using their own assessment information, you could apply that to all schools and not even bother doing this,” he says.

Merrick, of Early Education, says that her organisation is “hoping that Labour [if elected] will commit, as part of their assessment review”, to “revisit all of this”.

“We’re still keen to see [the RBA] go - sooner rather than later,” she says.

But if the RBA were to be abolished, should another form of assessment replace it?

“We need assessment data for when [children] enter Reception…but also when they enter, I would argue, early years provision,” says Jan Dubiel, an independent early years adviser specialising in EYFS.

“But it has to be the right data, telling us the right things in the right kind of way.”

Dubiel oversaw the implementation and moderation of the EYFS Profile for what was then the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, and was a former head of national and international development at early years training company Early Excellence, which developed the EExBA.

Early years assessment, says Dubiel, must be designed to inform teaching and be driven by research, which shows that “the things that matter in early years” include language, learning behaviours and executive function. “We need an assessment system that looks at that,” he adds.

That, he continues, “should be the focus of [Labour’s] review - how can we modify the data we collect [in the early years]…how do we ensure it’s showing the kinds of trajectories [children] are going to take, and how we can close the gaps between children who have different trajectories at that point”.

“That’s a much bigger discussion than the RBA,” he says.

John Morgan is a freelance journalist

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