Nursery World - Editor’s view

The title of the government consultation ‘Primary Assessment in England’ might have led the early years sector to conclude it didn’t much involve them.

The just-published response shows, however, that the proposals are of fundamental importance for the Early Years Foundation Stage.

First, there is the expected return of the Baseline – to be revived despite its two previous failures, which wasted huge amounts of time, money and effort.

Yet up it pops again, with government determined to put a number on four-year-olds just starting Reception that can be used to measure their progress by the end of primary school (News, pages 4-5).

As the Institute of Education’s Alice Bradbury and Guy Roberts-Holmes argue in their online comment for us, the data gathered by Baseline checks are ‘dangerous, inappropriate and flawed’, negating young children’s complexity and ignoring the contextual factors that affect them.

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