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Reception baseline scrapped by Gov. Does this government know what it is doing?

23 replies

MillyDLA · 07/04/2016 19:09

www.gov.uk/government/news/reception-baseline-comparability-study-published

A pilot, yes, but we didn't need to spend time and money doing this. As professionals we knew this would be the outcome. What a waste.

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spanieleyes · 07/04/2016 19:25

Not to worry, they will come up with a statutory baseline assessment soon, just imagine, rows and rows of 4 year olds all being tested as soon as they walk through the classroom door Angry

HarveySchlumpfenburger · 07/04/2016 19:28

Shocking!

You mean to say that 3 totally different assessments that test different things in totally different ways aren't comparable? Who'd have thought it.

Next we'll probably discover that 2 years isn't enough time to teach a 7 year curriculum and that reading assessment materials are better released before the deadline for submitting results.

MillyDLA · 07/04/2016 20:48

Or that measures of progress might be decided as we teach children and plan for them rather than retrospectively at the end of the year.

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Lara2 · 07/04/2016 20:51

Of course they don't! They are a bunch of useless twats!

admission · 07/04/2016 21:16

It is probably a good thing that they have decided that they cannot base progress from a start of a reception baseline. However for any school I think there i still a need to know what each pupil joins the school being able to do. So I would expect most schools to still be checking where each pupil is against the reception level national curriculum expectations.

MillyDLA · 07/04/2016 21:19

As experienced professionals we have always used our professional judgement to find out what a child can do and plan for their next steps.

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LadyWithLapdog · 07/04/2016 21:26

They are a bunch of clowns.

mrz · 07/04/2016 21:37

They are continuing to fund baseline assessment for 2016/17 even though they won't be using it

Reception baseline scrapped by Gov. Does this government know what it is doing?
Feenie · 08/04/2016 12:35

Of course they don't! They are a bunch of useless twats!

And once again, I find myself longing for a 'like ' button.

Floggingmolly · 08/04/2016 12:40

Why do we need to know what each pupil joining the school is able to do? Most courses of study presume all students arrive on an equal footing (they're not, of course, but that's how the course will be taught), why should reception be any different?

mrz · 08/04/2016 12:49

Because if you don't know you can't plan for individual needs. Schools have been doing baseline assessment for decades it's nothing new. What was new was that the government intended to use the results of the baseline assessment to measure progress from the beginning of reception to the end of Y6.

I suspect the DfE weren't too happy that most schools opted for an assessment system that didn't involve testing and provided a picture of the whole child rather than measure ability in reading, writing and maths.

HarveySchlumpfenburger · 08/04/2016 17:19

Reception and other courses aren't the same though. Some aspects of literacy and numeracy excepted, many of the skills in the reception curriculum are skills that children develop in any setting they are in.

You can't assume that the children will have no spoken language, but similarly you can't assume that they will have the language and vocab skills necessary for their age.

Also both Ofsted and parents take a very dim view of children who enter reception with above average skills for their age leaving with skills that are average.

urbanfox1337 · 08/04/2016 21:12

So perhaps someone could explain how the government identifies and helps the white working class British children who are falling behind? Because schools are currently failing them.

HarveySchlumpfenburger · 08/04/2016 21:23

Schools have been identifying white British boys (and to extent girls) for the past decade if not longer. The interventions haven't done a great deal of good.

And if you look at the report released rather than the headlines you will see that the major cause of white British children failing is parents and that what schools do has very little impact. You will also be aware of the fact that in the Early Years white British children do very well compared to other groups and are not falling behind. So I have no idea how that question is relevant to baseline assessment.

gutrotwein · 08/04/2016 22:39

I'm retired.

I remember in my last year, we were told that three types of baseline assessment would be available. I remember asking - 'how are they going to make it accountable, seeing as three different assessments can be used?' (Not a clever or insightful question - just a question.) Then, I remember us all looking blank and despairing, and wondering what twats were running the show.

Well, I guess we can identify the twats now...

I sympathise with you.

How pleased I am to be gone.

urbanfox1337 · 09/04/2016 00:28

well i guess that answers it... we won't

isn't it great we have such caring primary teachers.

KingscoteStaff · 09/04/2016 07:46

urbanfox, did you read Rafa's comment?

HarveySchlumpfenburger · 09/04/2016 08:08

Well what do you suggest we should do urban?

Since you are so sure that it is schools to blame and it's them that have failed white British children, I'm sure you must also have the answers.

MoggyP · 09/04/2016 08:13

"the major cause of white British children failing is parents and that what schools do has very little impact"

This interests me.

If schools don't have much impact, why not? And should this be the case?

HarveySchlumpfenburger · 09/04/2016 08:58

There is some impact and there probably are things that some schools could do better, but it is hugely complex. I'm not even sure the select committee found the answer to this one. Societal factors was probably a better choice of words than parents.

Poverty of aspiration is something that I think has been discussed here before. Linked to that is probably the value people see in education, particularly as a way of pulling people out of poverty. It's not that easy to educate children that are not in school because something more interesting has come up.
In many cultures there's an attitude that education is the job of parents and schools. So if a child is not doing well at school parents will find additional work to do outside of school to ensure they keep up. There's also a much less fixed attitude to attainment and more of an attitude that that what you get out is what you put in.
You also have to take into account the fact that, particularly in the case of first generation immigrants, they are probably a selected group of motivated and highly aspirational families. Which probably has an impact on the expectations they have for their children.
I also suspect that many children may be being assessed in Early Years in a language that isn't their 1st, that they may be in the early stages of speaking. The fact that white British children are the highest attaining at that age may be falsely reassuring.

You can probably manage most of these things to an extent in primary. It's probably secondary, when children begin to have more responsibility for their own attitudes and learning that it tends to go wrong.

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