Petition against the government’s new base line assessment programme: bit.ly/mtas_baseline

• THE government is bringing in a new base line assessment programme in September 2021 which will be administered to four-year-olds in the first few weeks of Reception.

This will subject children not yet of statutory school age, some barely past their fourth birthday, to assessments in the name of accountability, so that schools can demonstrate the “value” they add between Reception and Year 6.

However the National Education Union believes the proposed assessments, which will involve taking each child out of class and going through a series of questions with them on a tablet, will not be a reliable or valid source of data for this purpose, so will not improve the quality of schools and will not benefit children.

Early years experts (including Early Education, the British Association for Early Childhood Education, and the British Educational Research Association) agree the tests are pointless and could be damaging.

They take up staff time at a crucial moment when children should be settling in; the results will not be used for any kind of formative assessment to aid teaching and Early Years teachers already do their own baseline assessments to plan their teaching for the year.

This assessment has been threatened for a while, but our Early Years members think, particularly after the disruptions to education all children have had this year, Reception should be about nurturing children, letting them find their feet in primary school and working together with them as they discover what formalised learning is all about.

We hope parents and others will agree that these tests are damaging and unnecessary. Join the campaign against them. You can sign a petition at: bit.ly/mtas_baseline.

If you would like to know more, please email gerald.clark@neu.org.uk.

GERALD CLARK 
Camden NEU Secretary