Three Baseline providers approved following delays

The Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring, Durham University (CEM), along with Early Excellence, and the National Foundation for Educational Research have been confirmed as the three approved providers of the scheme.

As Nursery World reported last month, delays seemed to have hit the approval process, after 11,000 of England’s 17,000 primary schools had opted for the Early Excellence scheme.

The Department for Education had been due to inform schools on 3 June which of the six baseline providers have made it on to the final list of providers, so that schools whose first option was not successful in achieving the required number of schools can choose to go with another provider.

NFER said its baseline is a face-to-face resource-based assessment with a mixture of tasks and observational checklists. ‘It uses resources that children would typically find in an Early Years Foundation Stage, such as counting bears, plastic shapes, number cards and picture cards.’

Commenting on the announcement, Carole Willis, chief executive of NFER. said, ‘The NFER Reception Baseline Assessment has been extensively trialled by over 500 schools and 3000 pupils, who provided positive and valuable feedback that helped shape the robust assessment.  We are delighted to now be confirmed as an approved supplier for delivery in September.’

Providers had to sign up 10 per cent of all primary schools by the end of April and submit their data to the Department for Education (DfE) to be in with a chance of being on the DfE's approved list of providers to offer the baseline from September.

Asked for details on how many schools had signed up to the NFER and CEM baselines, a DfE spokesperson said he was unable to comment because the information was ‘commercially sensitive’.

Meanwhile, campaigns against the introduction of the baseline continue to gather pace. Many early years organisations, academics and others have joined the teaching unions to voice their opposition to the scheme. A Change.org petition against the tests has already attracted more than 6,500 signatures.

A new joint campaign and petition, called Better without the Baseline, has been set up - uniting the Save Childhood Movement, the Pre-school Learning Alliance, The British Association for Early Childhood Education (Early Education), TACTYC:The Association for Professional Development in Early Years and the National Association for Primary Education (NAPE) - opposing its introduction.

In a joint statement, teaching unions the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) and Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers, said they were ‘deeply concerned’ about the baseline’s introduction.

‘We believe that it is essential for teachers to assess children as they start school, in order to plan learning that supports and challenges each individual. But we believe that the national baseline system has been designed to provide numerical scores rather than useful information for teaching. None of the assessment schemes listed in the DfE’s announcement is an exception to this rule.
 
‘We are unconvinced by the Government’s claim that giving children a baseline score is essential to their successful progress through primary education. We are concerned that baseline is a measure which will further contribute to the narrowing of the primary curriculum, and to its dominance by a culture of testing, which is neither in the interests of teachers nor of children.’
 
They said they were concerned about the impact on teachers of such late changes, with schools less than a month away from the end of the academic year, when schools were busy with trips and ‘enrichment activities’.

Schools that have chosen a scheme which was not approved will now have to decide whether to choose a new scheme, familiarise themselves with the materials and carry out training in the remaining few weeks of term to make the best use of the assessments in September.

They added that the late announcement breaches the education secretary’s commitment to give ‘much more notice for changes related to accountability, curriculum or qualifications’  and to ease teachers’ workloads.

‘As the education budget faces devastating cuts of £450 million this year we have to question whether the £5 million per year that this scheme will cost could be spent in a better way.

'Where our members are involved in baseline assessment this autumn, we will be encouraging them to evaluate it carefully, and to measure it against their knowledge of what good early years’ assessment and a rich and fulfilling early years curriculum look like. We will not hesitate to make their views known to parents, the wider public, and the Government.’
 
Commenting last month on the success of the EExBA, national development manager Jan Dubiel, said, 'We're pleased that people have decided to go with an observation-based model. The numbers indicate the strength of commitment to that sort of assessment.’

• The new petition is at www.betterwithoutbaseline.org.uk