Have you heard of IELS? Very likely not, yet it’s important and the early years community should know and care about it. Let me explain.
IELS stands for the ‘International Early Learning Child Well-being Study’, which is the latest of a series of international large-scale assessments (or ILSAs) of children and adults being developed by the Organisation for Economic Cooperation and Development (OECD).
The best known of these ILSAs is the ‘Programme for International Student Assessment’ or PISA, a triennial international programme of testing 15-year-olds in reading, maths and science, which began in 2000; the results from the eighth round of testing, involving 690,000 students from 81 countries and economies were published in December 2023.
Now, with IELS, the OECD is moving testing down the age range. The IELS is a cross-national assessment of five-year-olds on four ‘early learning domains’ (early literacy and numeracy skills, self-regulation, and social and emotional skills), based on ‘developmentally-appropriate, interactive stories and games delivered on a tablet device’.
This is supplemented by information (individual background, home learning environment, early childhood education and care experience, children’s skills) from staff and parents using questionnaires. The first round of the IELS began in 2016, and ended in 2020 when reports of the study were published. Now, there is a second round, which will see the final report published in 2026.
The OECD depends on countries signing up (and paying) to participate in its assessments. To date it has struggled to get support for the IELS. Just three countries took part in the first round: England, Estonia and the USA). Only eight are participating in the second round: England, Korea, Malta, Netherlands and the UAE, plus parts of Azerbaijan (Baku); Belgium (Flanders); Brazil (three states) and China (Hangzhou province).
Notably, just one country has signed up for both rounds. The Department for Education has twice volunteered England’s five-year-olds (or a sample of them – 3000 from 200 schools in the first round) for testing. The new Labour government has maintained the outgoing Conservative administration’s commitment.
Despite its long-running story, the IELS remains a closed book, in two main ways. First, there is a pervasive lack of information about IELS from both the OECD and the DfE. Few people in national early childhood communities know about this initiative, with little attempt made to reach out to them. Worse, no attempt has been made to consult with these communities, to sound out their views on the IELS itself and participation in it.
This matters because the IELS is a closed book in another way. The Study has been criticised on many grounds. To take just three examples: its disinterest in context, with no information collected on the wider political, social, cultural and pedagogical context in participating countries; the absence of any rationale (apart from a willingness to pay to participate) for the inclusion of participating countries, and consequently no obvious point to comparing them; and the paucity of the results from the first cycle, telling us ‘very little that we did not know already’. These and other criticisms have been raised by distinguished researchers from different countries – but elicit no response from OECD.
In short, OECD and DfE plough on regardless, ignoring serious questions raised about the IELS, apparently impervious to criticism. What do they think about the criticisms levelled at IELS? Are they even aware of them? Has DfE discussed them with OECD? If so, how does OECD respond? We don’t know.
On its website, AlphaPlus (‘an education service business that specialises in standards, assessment and certification’), the company that won the contract to conduct the current round of the IELS in England for DfE, says the project’s aim is ‘to help countries to improve children’s early learning experiences in order to better support their development and overall well-being’. Given the criticisms of the IELS, ignored of course by the company, it is hard to see how these goals might be achieved.
Back in the 1980s, Loris Malaguzzi, the great Italian early childhood educator, warned of the spread of what he called ‘Anglo-Saxon testology’, which is ‘nothing but a ridiculous simplification of knowledge, and a robbing of meaning from individual histories.’ When there is so much important comparative research that needs to be undertaken, it seems sad that neither OECD nor DfE have heeded Malaguzzi’s warning.
Peter Moss is Emeritus Professor of Early Childhood Provision at the Thomas Coram Research Unit, UCL Institute of Education. Contact him at peter,moss@ucl.ac.uk. For more information on IELS, go to here.
