Question to the Department for Education:

To ask His Majesty's Government what happens to, and who owns, data digitally captured under the new Reception Baseline Assessment; and what if any commercial use could be made either of the response data itself or of any other metadata.

The reception baseline assessment (RBA) is a short, interactive assessment of early mathematics, language, literacy, and communication. Its purpose is to provide baseline data for primary progress measures, which will show the progress pupils in a school make from reception until the end of key stage 2.

RBA data is owned by the department. From the 2025/26 academic year, data from the assessment will be collected via the Standard and Testing Agency’s digital assessment platform, after which the data necessary to calculate school-level progress measures will be transferred to the National Pupil Database (NPD). This data will be stored in the NPD until the relevant cohort of pupils reaches the end of key stage 2. Some data and metadata will be used to support operational delivery of the assessment, for example to support helpdesk queries. The use of the data is governed by the RBA Privacy Notice which is available here: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/reception-baseline-assessment-privacy-notice. RBA data is not available for commercial use.