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

Lord Watson of Invergowrie Excerpts

Tuesday 13th July 2021 Lords Chamber

Moved by

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie]

That this House regrets that the Early Years Foundation Stage (Miscellaneous Amendments) and Childcare Fees (Amendment) Regulations 2021 introduces the Reception Baseline Assessment that takes effect in September 2021, when the workload of teachers will be significant, schools will be focused on re-opening, and special attention will need to be paid to those children who were unable to develop their language skills because of social isolation during the pandemic; and calls on Her Majesty’s Government to provide schools with the flexibility to defer implementation of the Reception Baseline Assessment for the cohort of children starting Reception this year until January 2022.

Relevant document: 53rd Report from the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee, Session 2019-21 (special attention drawn to the instrument)

[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I make no apology for the wording of this regret Motion being based on the Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee’s report, which very clearly set out the concerns felt by committee members after they had considered these regulations and their effect.

I want to make it clear that in tabling this regret Motion we are not anti-assessment. Assessment in schools is integral to measuring a child’s progress, which at this time is more important than ever. However, the reception baseline assessment that is the subject of these regulations does not assess, nor is it intended to, the progress of children—at least, not within a timeframe that would enable any improvements to be made. It is not a diagnostic assessment; it is designed as a data-collection exercise, with the data collected used to measure the progress of a child from reception to the end of key stage 2. The information will be locked away for a period of seven years, then used to measure school performance. The results will not be given to parents or teachers, other than a “narrative statement” with comments such as “the child recognised fewer than 10 numbers”.

The purpose of the baseline assessment is to produce a score by which the Government claim it will be possible to measure the quality of education. That ignores the views of experts such as the British Educational Research Association, which has said it is not possible to test four year-olds and get reliable data.

The Government say that the aims of the changes are

“to improve outcomes for all children at age 5, especially disadvantaged children and to reduce teacher and practitioner workload so that more time can be spent interacting with children in their care.”

There is nothing to disagree with there, but the baseline assessment was designed prior to the pandemic—an event that has disrupted children’s education and development in ways that could not have been foreseen and which will increase the extent to which children from disadvantaged families arrive at school less well-prepared than their more affluent counterparts. If the Government had said that the intention was to identify those children and provide them with specific, targeted help, that would have been welcome, because none of the paltry recovery funding that caused Sir Kevan Collins to resign is to be spent on under-fives.

The baseline assessment cannot be properly evaluated until 2028, when the first cohort tested at reception has taken their key stage 2 SATs. Perhaps the Minister can provide her understanding of how a 20-minute snapshot test taken at the age of four can be compared with the results of three days of tests taken under exam conditions at the age of 11, particularly when school cohorts can change markedly from reception to year 6. Children move schools, as do teachers and school leaders. The child’s unique pupil number will follow them, but if they begin at one school and move to another, perhaps even to a third, how can the school at either end of that process be measured?

Reception teachers will still carry out their own observation-based assessments over a period of weeks to gain a comprehensive and holistic picture of what each pupil can do. This will provide better information than anything gained from a snapshot 20-minute test. The Secondary Legislation Scrutiny Committee raised questions as to the various stages of development at which children present on their first day at school. For instance, a difference in age has been shown to produce pronounced developmental differences. Autumn-born children have demonstrated a strong advantage in attainment over their younger, summer-born peers in assessments similar to the one proposed.

I hope that the Minister can tell us what recognition will be given to contextual factors in the interpretation of the data. It is generally recognised that the only proper way to make comparisons between schools is to make adjustments for the prior attainments of their pupils when they enter those schools, and to control for other relevant characteristics of pupil intakes such as parents’ educational levels, family income and having English as an additional language. Such adjustments lead to what are known as value-added comparisons, a term that the Government have used in relation to the baseline assessment.

We are told that the assessment will be

“covering material that many pupils will already be familiar with.”

No doubt some will be familiar with that material, depending on what they have previously been taught, but what about those children who have not had the same experiences at home or in an early years setting? Children whose background experiences have not prepared them to answer the maths and English questions may have high levels of curiosity, motivation, and persistence, which will help them to make rapid progress in school, but the test cannot measure such things, nor can it measure motor skills.

When Schools Minister Nick Gibb MP began to experience pushback against the baseline assessment he wrote to all Conservative MPs to explain why it was happening and attached a factsheet in response to criticisms. The burden of administering the test was written off as being carried out “in normal teaching time”, but it is far from normal for teachers to spend many classroom hours in the crucial first weeks of reception taking children aside one-to-one to ask them structured questions. What will be the experience of the other 29 children during that time? That is why a delay is necessary.

Just last month, the Department for Education published a thematic report from the international early learning study, Young Children’s Development and Deprivation in England. It confirms that both family and school deprivation are related to lower development in emergent literacy, emergent numeracy and mental flexibility. It provides clear evidence that by measuring children’s numeracy and literacy outcomes, the baseline assessment is actually providing a proxy for measures of deprivation. That is particularly the case in the light of the pandemic, which should have occasioned a review of the baseline assessment on the grounds that the basis for the baseline has shifted, and certainly not in a positive way, for so many four year-olds. There is no shortage of evidence as to the significant impact on early years children, particularly those from disadvantaged families.

Teachers are currently planning for reception intakes of pupils who in many cases will not be school-ready. Teachers are having to modify their approaches and will be making continuous assessments, using their professional judgment, of the children in front of them. Requiring pupils to complete a baseline assessment at this time could be enormously challenging. A delay would give teachers time to prepare and enable them to focus on supporting children who faced a pared-down early years education. In preparation for these regulations, an equality assessment was conducted in January 2020. That is now hopelessly out of date. What steps have Ministers taken to satisfy themselves that the baseline assessment is now a fair measure, given the new set of challenges and the increased inequalities created in early years as a result of the pandemic?

If the baseline assessment is being used as a form of measurement with which to judge progress made during primary school, would it not make more sense to delay the process to help avoid a situation whereby pupils are producing results that are not reflective of their abilities due to education lost to the pandemic? Is it realistic to expect that a baseline assessment conducted in autumn 2021 is going to be useful or reflective of anything normal, let alone as a measure of progress in 2028? A delay would help support recovery in a way that is manageable for teachers and meaningful for children. With the reception baseline assessments set to be introduced in less than two months, those are all questions that parents are entitled to hear the Minister answer. I look forward to her response. I beg to move.

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[Lord Watson of Invergowrie (Lab) [V]]

My Lords, I thank the Minister for her response. I also thank all noble Lords who have spoken. It is not often that I am accused of being timorous, as suggested by the noble Lord, Lord Addington, but I am sure he meant it as a compliment. The Back-Bench speakers were all opposed to reception baseline assessment; only the strength of their rhetoric varied. The Minister must have felt that she was very much swimming against the tide, although I suspect that is not a position that she is entirely unfamiliar with.

I thank the Minister for her valiant attempt to respond to noble Lords, but ultimately she merely reinforced the Government’s position that the reception baseline assessment will have a start date of September. For that reason, I wish to test the opinion of your Lordships’ House.