Among the recommendations in Dame Clare Tickell's review of the EYFS, are several that address one particular aspect - assessment.
Much has been debated and written about the time-consuming nature of observations, the bureaucracy of recording, and the use of assessments to set targets and measure progress; Dame Clare alludes to this during several points of her report. At the heart of all these issues lies the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP).
Currently the only statutory assessment in the entire EYFS, the Profile often bears the burden of a hostile view of the notion of assessment itself. It suffers from the three Ms: misunderstanding, mythology and misuse. Although the Tickell recommendations suggest that the EYFSP is to be radically overhauled, much of the rationale and key principles are to remain intact, and the EYSFP scales themselves, set to be simplified, retain a similarity to the original assessment.
Assessment is a critical feature of effective practice in the EYFS and is therefore important to get right. Although the EYFSP is designed to be the summary of children's attainment at the end of the EYFS, it contains within it clear principles of assessment that are pertinent from birth to five and so are of relevance to practitioners working with young children in all sectors.
WHY IS ASSESSMENT SO IMPORTANT?
We assess what we value and make judgements on what we consider to be important. How we assess reflects our understanding of how children develop and learn.
It is widely accepted that training and support available for the EYFSP has increased understanding of the importance of observational assessment, the role of child-initiated activity and the use of practitioners' knowledge of the child to make professional judgements. This has often empowered practitioners to have a greater belief in their own knowledge and expertise and to trust their own instincts and judgements. It is reassuring to see that this is reflected in the recommendations, with references to observations from 'embedded learning' as the key way in which judgements about children's development are made.
Information from all sources, not just the practitioner, is essential for accurate assessment, and all adults who work with the child need to contribute information, as do parents, other agencies and children themselves. Moderation by local authorities has helped to embed these facts and increase confidence in the reliability and validity of EYFSP data.
The annual national publication of this data, while controversial, has helped to raise the status of EYFS practice and provide robust, appropriate and meaningful means of accountability. For teachers in Year One (Y1), it provides fine-grain and detailed information of all aspects of each child's learning and enables them to shape their provision appropriately. It provides an authentic picture of what children can do, within the context of the statutory Early Learning Goals (ELGs).
WHAT IS THE EYFSP?
It is worth reminding ourselves of what the EYFSP actually is, what it consists of, how it works and what happens to it.
Practitioners gather information about the children in their setting all the time. Much of this is not recorded formally but nevertheless is important. Towards the end of the year, practitioners are required to translate this information into a completed EYFS Profile. Sometimes this is completed electronically, and sometimes within an existing system used by the setting, such as a 'Learning Journey'.
The EYFSP divides the six areas of learning into 13 scales that reflect the EYFS statutory framework:
1. Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Dispositions and Attitudes
2. Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Social Development
3. Personal, Social and Emotional Development: Emotional Development
4. Communication, Language and Literacy: Language for Communication and Thinking
5. Communication, Language and Literacy: Linking Sounds and Letters
6. Communication, Language and Literacy: Reading
7. Communication, Language and Literacy: Writing
8. Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Numbers for Labels and for Counting
9. Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Calculating
10. Problem Solving, Reasoning and Numeracy: Shape, Space and Measure
11. Knowledge and Understanding of the World
12. Physical Development
13. Creative Development
Dame Clare has recommended that any new version of the EYFSP fully reflects the suggested changes to the areas of learning, and therefore assessments would be made against the Prime Areas (Personal, Social and Emotional Development; Communication and Language; and Physical Development) and the Specific Areas (Literacy, Mathematics, Expressive Arts and Design, and Understanding the World). Although this shifts the emphasis slightly and reconfigures the look of the areas of learning, the basic content remains.
Each of these scales has nine points:
- - 1, 2, and 3 are sequential and hierarchical. They indicate developmental steps that lead up to the ELGs. Children attaining these at the end of Reception Year (YR) have not attained any ELGs at all. This means that the Y1 teacher will have to shape carefully an appropriate curriculum still using the EYFS, in order to ensure that their learning and developmental needs are met.
- - Points 4, 5, 6, 7 and 8 replicate the ELGs in that aspect of the area of learning. These are not hierarchical and the number of the Scale Point (SP) is there as a label and not an accumulative measure. Children can attain these in any order and it is quite common for a child to produce a non-sequential pattern of attainment, such as 4, 6 and 8, especially when the scale points refer to specific content.
- - Scale point 9 is attained when children have attained all of 4 to 8 and are working at a significantly higher, or more developed level. Scale Point 9 exists, not as an aspiration, but to enable the YR practitioner to identify significantly able children as they transfer into Y1. Again, this will enable the Y1 teacher to provide an appropriately challenging curriculum from the start.
Within the EYFSP proposed by Dame Clare, this information has been reduced from nine scale points to three. What are currently Scale Points 1, 2 and 3 have been collected under the term of 'emerging', Scale Points 4 to 8 under the term 'expected', and Scale Point 9 under the term 'exceeding'.
MAKING THE RIGHT JUDGEMENTS
To support practitioners in making the right judgements and to make sure that there is a national consistency for what is essentially a subjective set of judgements, exemplification materials as written examples and video footage are provided by the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA) through the EYFSP Handbook and their website (www.qcda.gov.uk) respectively. This helps practitioners gain a sense of the 'pitch' of the Scale Points and know when a child has fully attained the criteria. This is further quality assured by local authority-appointed moderators (often accredited by QCDA) who visit practitioners and discuss the judgements they have made. It seems reasonable to assume that this process will need to continue with any new system, to ensure the same national consistency of judgement.
USING THE EYFSP
At the end of this process, practitioners have information about the attainment in all six areas of learning for all of the children in YR. This provides finer detail about which children will need specific challenge and about which children will need support, as they move forward to their next practitioner in Y1. This is the 'primary purpose' of the EYFSP - to provide Y1 teachers with information about their incoming cohort so that they can shape the curriculum, challenges and expectations and meet the needs of individual learners and groups.
The importance of a seamless transition from EYFS to Y1 is stressed by Dame Clare, stating that effective Key Stage One (KS1) practice should build on the child's experiences in the EYFS. This is precisely what any effective assessment should record. Y1 teachers have known for a long time that some children leaving YR are not yet developmentally ready for the demands of the National Curriculum of KS1. This could be for a number of reasons and sometimes purely because they are summer-born and have yet to make the developmental steps required. EYFSP data gives practitioners the 'permission' to do what is necessary to sensitively and appropriately provide what is needed for these children.
YR practitioners make sensible use of the information that the EYFSP provides them with. For instance: what does attainment in Creative Development tell practitioners about their provision? Are there particular Scale Points that remain unattained by significant percentages of the cohort? If so, why is this? Does the environment lack opportunities for learning in these areas? Is assessment accurate?
Often this information feeds into the practitioner's own evaluation of their setting and enables them to develop their provision and practice in the light of what the data has told them.
INAPPROPRIATE USE OF THE EYFSP
It has also become clear that other uses are often made of the EYFSP. In many cases this is not by the practitioner, but by other bodies, and more often than not, this is done without a fully functioning understanding of the purpose and principles of the EYFSP.
There have been incidents of PVI and maintained settings completing the EYFSP and using this as a description of attainment for consultations with parents and information for the YR practitioner on entry. The EYFSP is totally unsuitable for this purpose, and only practitioners for YR should be completing it. It is not relevant for any point prior to this. The EYFSP was developed as a summary of attainment for the end of EYFS. Using it before YR displays lack of understanding and is wholly inappropriate.
Equally inappropriate is the idea, promoted by some local authorities, headteachers and School Improvement Partners (SIPs) that children in the EYFS should make 'four Scale Points of progress' in a defined period of time. This is nonsensical. It misinterprets the purpose of the EYFSP and the way that is it structured. The attainment of four Scale Points could be a massive leap in development if this is from SP 1 to SP 4, as this moves across three stages of EYFS development. If the 'four points progress' is from 4 to 8, then the leap is far less dramatic. Given that in some scales, particularly Knowledge and Understanding of the World, Physical Development and Creative Development, each of the SPs are more related to specific content, then it makes the notion even more inappropriate.
It has also been tempting for some external bodies to simplify the complexities of children's development and learning to a 'simple mathematical formula'. This links together attainment, as summarised in the EYFSP, with outcomes in the KS1 statutory assessment that takes place at the end of Y2. The logic is simplicity itself - a number of points in each scale will lead to a particular level of attainment in KS1. However, when this is applied to real cohorts of children, the formula simply doesn't work. Attainment of children in KS1 varies wildly in relation to their attainment in the EYFSP.
The EYFSP has been held responsible for practitioners' completion of 'detached' observations, which have prevented practitioners from interacting with children because of long periods of observation. Guidance published by QCDA makes no such requirement. It states that ... '(observations) can be very short and can occur as part of another activity and practitioners may be observing children alongside their ongoing interaction.' In short, these observations are the means of knowing and understanding the learning and attainment of the children, woven into everyday practice, and it is a matter of professional judgment as to how these are managed.
MISUNDERSTANDINGS
Misunderstandings also surround beliefs about the amount and type of evidence practitioners require in order to demonstrate that their judgements are accurate and consistent. There is no need to submit three Post-it notes and a photograph for each Scale Point for it to be secure, or at least one lengthy observation for each SP, alongside 'some' Post-it notes, photographs and shorter observations.
The QCDA guidance couldn't be more straightforward. It clearly defines 'evidence' as 'any material, knowledge of the child, anecdotal incident, result of observation or information from additional sources that support the overall picture of the child's development'. Evidence is a matter for the professional judgement of practitioners. 'There is no expectation or requirement that such evidence is always formally recorded or documented.'
Referring to what practitioners need to do when discussing their judgments with local authority moderators, QCDA guidance states that 'it is their final assessment of the child, based on all the evidence they have (documented or not) that informs their completion of the EYFS profile, and it is this judgement that is moderated by the LA'.
Most controversial of all has been what has become known as the '80/20 rule', which relates to the ratio of evidence required to make a judgement for the EYFSP. The QCDA handbook states that 'no more than 20 per cent of the total evidence for each Scale Point is gained from adult-led and adult-directed activities. The remainder of evidence should be drawn from knowledge of the child, observations and anecdotal assessments'.
The rationale for this stems from the need to be sure that a child has truly attained a particular SP. This has important implications for the use of the information as they begin life in Y1. A child who only ever demonstrates a behaviour or skill when an adult asks them to, during a directed activity, but never during a self-initiated activity, cannot be said to be confident enough to have assimilated it into everyday activity.
The consequence of this would be that they would still need support in this area and opportunities to demonstrate their familiarity and confidence with it. Contrast this with the child who takes the same skill and uses it confidently and easily within self-initiated activity. This child has absorbed the essence of the skill or behaviour into their everyday activity. They are so familiar and at ease with it, so aware of its purpose that they use it to achieve their own desired result.
The understanding of these two children is essentially and critically different, so the 80/20 ratio was established to help practitioners be sure that children were demonstrating truly attaining SPs. However, it was never the intention to use this to add to practitioners' bureaucratic burdens. Again, the QCDA Handbook unambiguously states, 'Practitioners are neither expected nor required to create onerous systems in order to demonstrate this, but need to be aware of this ratio when considering the evidence in order to finalise their EYFS profile judgments.'
EYFSP AND ACCOUNTABILITY
The existence of a statutory assessment for the end of the EYFS has done much to raise the status and impact of early years pedagogy by presenting the data as robust information from which accountability can be derived.
- - It has vigorously promoted the importance of child-initiated activity as a key means with which to understand development.
- - It has empowered practitioners to rely on their knowledge of children and professional judgement as a valid and secure form of evidence, and clearly challenges the need for copious records to support this.
- - It provides critical and important information on all aspects of children's learning and development as they transfer from EYFS to Y1 and supports the continuity that children need in order to thrive.
Despite the persistent mythologies and misuses, the EYFSP remains an 'unfashionable' success story in securing effective practice. It requires, as illustrated in the handbook, high-quality, appropriate early years practice, which could easily be undermined by those with less understanding of early years pedagogy if the profile were to be removed. Any attempt to use more easily measured formal tasks for teaching and assessment would de-skill children significantly and would deprofessionalise practitioners.
Even for those who are not YR practitioners, the principles on which the EYFSP is based are completely relevant and have enabled more effective and meaningful assessment to become integrated into everyday practice for everyone involved with early years children.
CASE STUDY: GARSWOOD PRIMARY SCHOOL, ST HELENS
The EYFSP fully serves the needs of all children in that it enables practitioners to identify effectively the strengths of each child and to plan to support children's further development, write head teacher Pam Potter and reception class teacher Sue Bagshaw.
The inclusive nature of the Profile enables all children to be encouraged to learn and to become independent and innovative, creative and imaginative. The Profile also supports practitioners in creating an environment that enables highly effective self-initiated learning. Importantly too, it demonstrates and celebrates children's progress and signposts next steps in their learning, all of which can be shared effectively across a variety of settings and with the child's family.
Children's learning stories interlink with the EYFSP and their family's 'voice' - which permeates the Learning Story methodology of early years pioneer Margaret Carr - and contribute to the evidence on which practitioners base their judgements. Such an approach serves to consolidate learning, gives a fair and accurate reflection of a child's achievements and fosters positive relationships between all the parties involved in securing the best possible outcomes for each unique child.
Additionally, the Profile encourages an effective method of assessing children through observation, so ensuring we look at the whole child. It personalises learning, encompassing all areas of learning and development, and supports the holistic nature of education.
It is a tool to support teaching and learning. The materials that sit alongside the document are useful CPD resources. This includes effective methods to transfer information to Y1 practitioners so the children experience a seamless approach to their learning and developmentally appropriate experiences and curriculum as they leave the reception class.
At Garswood, transition is not limited to one meeting or the handing over of data and files. Practitioners meet on numerous occasions to discuss each child and relate this to the EYFSP. We find the FSP an essential tool to provide the very best experiences for young children at this crucial stage of their lives.
