Persuading a four-year-old to stick to a task, let alone one that is weighted for assessment, is tough for any adult, whether you’re a teacher, a parent or Andy from Andy’s Dinosaur Adventures.
So, how can we measure a four-year-old child’s abilities?
If you asked the government, the answer, it seems, would be “test a lot”. By the time they leave Reception, a child will have completed the baseline test, had continuous assessment during the course of the year and have a specific early years foundation stage profile, summing up their knowledge, understanding, abilities and attainment against expected levels.
For many in the early years, this is a problem. The assessments may be unreliable, argues Jan Dubiel, an internationally recognised specialist in early childhood education. He says that young children do not perform accurately and reliably in test situations, because they don’t understand that they need to get the right answer. The resulting data, therefore, is inaccurate.
But is there another way? Yes, says Samuel Meisels, an expert in early childhood development at the University of Nebraska. The key, he explains, is not to test children but to watch them.
“Children may make gains in cognitive tasks shortly after starting school or even a year later, but may not be able to demonstrate these gains when they are being tested at the outset of school,” he says. “This is one of the reasons why observational assessments, which take place on multiple occasions in a child’s school experience, can be so meaningful.”
Observational assessment approaches are favoured by some early years teachers, too. Helen Pinnington, early years foundation lead at St Thomas More’s Catholic Primary School in Hampshire, says children are more likely to reveal a full picture of their abilities if testing is done through play.
However, there are those - both in academia and the classroom - who believe that standardised assessments are not, in fact, the enemy.
Julian Grenier, headteacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre in East London, says observation is important but it’s also vital to acknowledge “that we do not observe children in a neutral way”. Biases, including racial biases, could potentially come into play, he notes, plus “we will look for what we want to find - the phenomenon psychologists call ‘confirmation bias’.”
Therefore, is the best way to assess a four-year-old a bit of observation and a bit of standardised testing? It’s not clear cut. But whichever side of the fence you sit on, you can’t get away from the fact that the baseline assessment has been introduced and is now in place in schools.
So, how can teachers ensure that assessment helps to improve children’s learning?
Ruth Swailes, an early years specialist, says there should be a focus on “new and innovative ways to evidence learning so that teachers feel confident that if an inspector or a senior leader comes into the room, they will be able to see learning but not in an onerous way”, thereby freeing teachers “to spend time with children - which is what the job is about”.
Pinnington, however, believes that better assessment will come down to trust and understanding. “Early years teachers can very easily demonstrate progress, but we do need leaders and inspectors to allow some flexibility for this phase,” she says.
“We are often drawing on ‘softer data’, especially when a huge part of our learning is centred around personal, social and emotional development. Overall, it is key to remember that it’s best to notice learning in early years when children are doing it.”
John Morgan is a freelance journalist
Commentary: ‘We need to know what learning we’re looking for’
Julian Grenier is headteacher of Sheringham Nursery School and Children’s Centre, in East London, and the writer of the new Development Matters guidance. He says:
Two fault lines were apparent back in January, when this feature was first published, that are even clearer now.
Firstly, there is the move away from assessment using levels in the new Development Matters. For older pupils, it is widely understood that we need to check their learning is secure, step by step, rather than just generating data based on levels.
In the early years, we need to keep supporting practitioners to focus on assessment that is useful and informs their work - and move away from the old approach of using the age bands as levels, which create so much unnecessary workload.
Much of the important learning at this stage happens through children’s play. If we make learning more programmatic, it will arguably become poorer and less motivating.
However, as American researcher Ann Epstein explains in her book The Intentional Teacher, teachers need to be clear about the “big picture” of what we want children to know in order to support their learning through play.
Before we undertake assessment work in Reception, we therefore need to know what learning we’re looking for, and be clear about how we will use the information we gather to help each child achieve learning that matters. Only then can we meaningfully assess the important steps of learning, whatever context we observe them in.
The second major point is that it is troubling to see that many schools still ask their Reception staff to assess children against the Early Learning Goals from early in the autumn term, and submit data about which children are “on-track” to “achieve age-related expectations”.
This practice ignores the fact that the ELGs are statements of complex, linked operations. For example, for a child to “have a deep understanding of number to 10, including the composition of each number”, they need to know a lot of different things securely, and be able to apply all that knowledge at the same time: they need to know the number names in order; they need to know that you must say one number name for each object; they need to know that the last number name they say tells them how many items there are in the set.
Sensible assessment will look at each of those small chunks of learning, as we teach it. Only when we know that the child is fluent and secure in each step will it make sense to assess the child against an Early Learning Goal.
These are big issues that we still need to address if we are to make assessment in the early years truly worthwhile and not a pointless administrative exercise.
