More details of Reception Baseline confirmed

The National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) has brought together some of the evidence, practitioner expertise and experience it has drawn on for the new Reception Baseline.

It reveals that the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) will focus on children’s early literacy and mathematics skills, because research shows that these skill areas are good indicators of how children do later on in school.

The NFER also said it would be trialling questions designed to look at self-regulation and that the outcomes from trialling these questions would determine whether self-regulation is included in the final Reception Baseline.

In April, the assessment body was awarded the four-year £10m contract by the Department for Education to develop the Reception Baseline, including trialling, piloting and the first two statutory years of delivering it from September 2020.

In a statement on its website the NFER says, ‘The design and content of the Reception Baseline Assessment will be based firmly on evidence, including existing research on the key factors affecting later performance, practitioner expertise and large-scale trialling. This will ensure it has robust measurement properties and is a positive experience for teachers and children.

‘This is an initial summary in which we have brought together some of the evidence, practitioner expertise and experience we have drawn on in our proposals for the design, content and delivery of this new baseline assessment. It also highlights some of the detailed investigation which will be undertaken to refine these proposals over the next two years.’

The document says that ‘the close involvement of practitioners is always at the heart of our approach to development assessment and the RBA is no exception. We are working with a wide range of individuals with expertise in early years’ assessment, children with special educational needs and disabilities, and with a panel of Reception teachers.’

It says that it will be trialling and piloting the assessment with schools and children ‘to ensure it is a positive experience for them, as well as a robust assessment of children’s early literacy and early mathematics skills.’

The NFER says it has worked with children and practitioners this summer and will be trialling materials from September with nationally representative samples of schools. In June, the Department for Education said it would be inviting a sample of schools to take part in trialling the new assessment in the autumn.

The document says, ‘The RBA is designed to provide a measure of children’s performance at a cohort rather than an individual level. The assessment therefore focuses on the information needed to provide a reliable and valid baseline for progress measures which will be reported at the end of Key Stage 2.