Baseline 2021: Roll-out extended as opposition mounts

Exclusive: Critics call timing of announcement ‘extraordinary’ as momentum grows for primary assessment review

28th April 2021, 6:00pm

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The government has extended its contract to deliver the controversial baseline assessment for another year.

The news comes on the same day that a cross-party group of MPs and peers, as well as hundreds of headteachers, academics and education experts, called for the tests to be dropped in 2021-22 to give children time to catch up on lost learning.

Critics said the timing of the announcement was “extraordinary”, as momentum is “growing from all sides for a review of the primary assessment system as a whole”.

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An online notice, published yesterday, states that the Department for Education (DfE) has “invoked the option” to extend the contract, held by the National Foundation for Educational Research, to “allow for two statutory years of delivery” of the Reception baseline assessment (RBA).

The value of the contract has been increased to reflect this change, from £9.8 million to just over £12 million. It is now set to end in August 2023.

The notice states: “The department has invoked the option to extend the contract to allow for two statutory years of delivery. The overall value of the agreement has increased to accommodate the extension period.”

A spokesperson for the campaign group, More Than A Score, which today published a report calling for this year’s statutory introduction of the RBA to be postponed, said: “The last thing the DfE should be spending more money on is the RBA and it’s extraordinary that they are announcing this when calls are growing from all sides for a review of the primary assessment system as a whole.

“It’s time to listen to the experts, parents, heads and teaching unions all calling for a pause to all statutory assessments, including baseline, to give schools and pupils the time they need to recover lost learning and - in the case of four-year-olds - the opportunity to start school life without disruptive tests.”

It was originally intended that the RBA would become mandatory in September 2020, and that the contract would cover two years of statutory delivery in the academic years 2020-21 and 2021-22.

However the introduction of the assessment was postponed owing to the Covid crisis.

Schools were instead given the option to sign up for an “early adopter year” in 2020-21, to “familiarise themselves with assessment materials”.

The DfE has now invoked a provision in the original deal that “the department may extend the contract for one further academic year, until 31 August 2023”.

The news comes as calls have been growing for the new statutory start date, set for September 2021, to be pushed back.

Today’s More Than A Score report urged the government to “pause” the introduction of RBA in September, alongside all other statutory assessments in Years 1, 2, 4 and 6.

The call for action was sent to the government’s education recovery tsar Sir Kevan Collins, the DfE, the Education Select Committee and 10 Downing Street.

A DfE spokesperson said: “We have been clear over the past year that introducing the Reception baseline assessment will help have a fairer accountability system for schools, based on the educational progress their pupils make during their time at primary school.

“It’s vital that we understand how much progress primary schools help our children to make. These checks, which will replace the Sats taken at the end of Year 2, will be key in giving a better understanding of where a child is starting from when they arrive at school and reduce the number of assessments in primary schools overall.”