The revised EYFS aims to stop assessment from ruling our working lives. In the pre-Covid era, three-quarters of us in the early years were regularly stressed as a result of our job, according to Minds Matter(Early Years Alliance 2018).
The workload around assessment and tracking can ruin people’s lives. Yet all too often that time and effort are wasted. As one respondent to Minds Mattersaid, ‘No time to catch up on observations (who are these even for?) or other paperwork. Constantly chasing my tail feeling inadequate.’
Here, I will be considering how we might rethink assessment practice as we approach September 2021. That is when the new EYFS and Development Matters will replace the 2012 versions. But before focusing on change, we should pause to reflect. No practitioner or setting should stop using assessment in ways which work for them. We must not throw the baby out with the bathwater.
A CHILD’S EXPERIENCE
Our desire to prepare well for Ofsted inspections has often driven our work around assessment. So, it is important to note that Ofsted states there is no need to produce progress and attainment data for it. Inspectors will check how leaders and managers promote children’s progress from their different starting points. Then they will observe alongside leaders and managers to see how that looks in practice. Ofsted says its focus is ‘what it’s like to be a child in this setting’ – not piles of paperwork or rows of data. As the revised Development Matters says, ‘The child’s experience must always be central to the thinking of every practitioner.’
Practitioners who are using the revised EYFS have been welcoming this approach. Independent research into the pilot Early Learning Goals, published by the Education Endowment Foundation, found that practitioners ‘viewed the ELGs positively… [they] reported that their workload reduced due to reduced expectations for assessment and evidence-gathering, enabling them to spend more time with children.’
Early adopter practitioners have commented that ‘we play with our children so much more and collect meaningful and purposeful data’, and that ‘we’re trusted to make judgements about children and be present in their learning without worrying about evidence’. This usefully reminds us that most assessment is in the here and now.
We notice something that a child can do, or needs help with, and we respond straight away to support them. Sometimes that response is standing back, and being encouraging. Other times, we sensitively help children or join in with their play. This sort of assessment in the here and now is called feedback, and it is a powerful way of helping children’s development.
WHO IS AT FAULT?
How did assessment get to be so burdensome to us all? The blunt answer is that a whole range of people are at fault. I would include people like myself – as a head teacher, I asked for too much data and evidence from my team. Ofsted’s previous inspection framework emphasised gathering data about progress and outcomes. Many local authorities required large amounts of evidence for the EYFS Profile.
As a result, many us have been producing too much assessment data. For example, it is common to split up the age bands in the 2012 Development Matters into three levels, like ‘emerging, developing and secure’. With 17 strands of learning, if you have a group of 20 children whose development is mostly in two of those age bands, that’s 2,040 assessments to consider. As one of the practitioners in the Minds Matter report commented, ‘early years has become about making [children] fit a criteria – no consideration is given to the speed the children learn at the moment … Everything is now about ticking the right box.’
MORE FLEXIBILITY
The revised approach to assessment in the new EYFS is not just about reducing workload. It is about improving the way we use assessment, and allowing more flexibility for the needs of different settings.
An overview
For example, I’m the head teacher of a large maintained nursery school with more than 200 children on roll. It is important for us to have an overview of how all the children are progressing. We need to make sure that no group of children gets left behind. So, we use an iPad-based assessment system called Early Years Toolbox at two key points in the year. These eight apps measure the most important aspects of children’s development for their social, emotional, cognitive and life outcomes. The apps provide standardised assessments for the child’s age: they don’t disadvantage summer-born children.
This overview is useful, but it is only part of our approach. It is important for us to collect careful observations of children when they are engaged in significant learning. These extended observations tell us how children are learning, as well as what they know and what they can do. We only keep a small number of these: quality is more important than quantity.
In our setting, we use Tapestry to collate and share these observations, for three reasons. It has a child log-in, so the children can look back over their learning and reflect on it with their key people. Tania Choudhury, one of our practitioners, has written about how this helps children to develop their metacognition – thinking about their own learning (Choudhury 2020). It is also easy to share and discuss these observations with parents. The voices of children and parents are central to high-quality assessment.
Tapestry has worked closely with the early adopters of the revised EYFS. Dr Helen Edwards, the director of Tapestry, comments, ‘Our approach to observation and assessment embraces the new Development Matters in that the focus is less on tracking children’s knowledge and skills and more on identifying and describing their unique learning journeys.’
Checkpoints
The revised Development Mattersincludes a small number of checkpoints in the Prime Areas. We can use these to help us consider whether a child might be experiencing significant difficulties in their learning. For this group of children, accurate and high-quality assessment is especially important. We need to get to know them well. We need to spend time observing them and talking with their parents. We need to understand their strengths and fascinations, as well as pinpointing their areas of difficulty. We need to understand where the barriers to their learning might be.
When we bring this information together and reflect on it, it will help us to make changes so the children can begin to overcome those barriers. Where children are having difficulties, we may need to assess them in greater depth. For example, the Universally Speaking system is an excellent, free resource to help with the assessment of children’s communication.
A child might be finding literacy learning difficult in Reception. Careful assessment might highlight that they find it difficult to discriminate between different sounds. My own daughter is dyslexic, so she experienced this struggle. Her Reception teacher understood this. She gave her the extra help she needed to access a broad early literacy curriculum. She spent more time teaching her to hear different letter sounds. It wouldn’t have helped to label her as a child reading in the 16-26 months band. She wasn’t learning to read like a two-year-old: she was learning to read like a five-year-old with dyslexia.
Missing out
Unfortunately, other children may not be so lucky. Research by Iram Siraj and others for the EPPSE Project (2002) found that ‘children who were described by their teachers as “struggling to learn” experienced more creative and PSE aspects of the curriculum and less literacy and knowledge and understanding of the world’.
If we use assessment well, we can give children the extra help they need so that they don’t fall behind the majority. We must avoid giving them labels which describe them like younger children, and which can lower our expectations. When groups of children miss out on important aspects of the curriculum, they can fall behind. It is hard for them to catch up later.
IN SUMMARY
I am suggesting three principles should guide us as we rethink assessment in the run-up to the September 2021 revision of the EYFS. Review what you are doing, and keep doing things that work well for you. Choose the right tools for the job: what will work best for your setting. And stop doing work which does nothing to improve children’s care and learning. You will find better uses for the time you save.
ABOUT THIS SERIES
Development Matters (September 2020) is made up of two parts: an overview of seven key features of early years best practice, followed by tables setting out the pathways of children’s development. This series aims to describe these seven features, explain their importance and show how settings can incorporate them in their practice, so that they can deliver high-quality provision that meets the needs of each child in their setting. The guidance is at: https://bit.ly/2Fpxt5c
REFERENCES
- Choudhury T (2020). ‘Metacognition: replicating Lewis’s study at a diverse nursery school in East London’, https://bit.ly/39VU86J
- Early Years Alliance (2018). Minds Matter: The impact of working in the early years sector on practitioners’ mental health and wellbeing, https://bit.ly/3lXb2E1
- Education Endowment Foundation (2019). Early Years Foundation Stage Profile pilot, https://bit.ly/36QhbO8
- Grenier J, Finch S and Vollans C (Eds) (2017) Celebrating Children’s Learning: Assessment Beyond Levels in the Early Years. Routledge
- Grenier J (2020). Working with the revised Early Years Foundation Stage: Principles into Practice, http://development-matters.org.uk
- Siraj-Blatchford I et al(2002) Researching Effective Pedagogy in the Early Years, https://bit.ly/36Ud9o9
- The Communication Trust (2007) Universally Speaking, https://bit.ly/2JJcI7d
