The data, based on reception class teachers' assessments of four-and five-year-olds in 2003, was published last week by the Department for Education and Skills. It showed that girls were ahead of boys overall, in that girls were either meeting or working beyond the Early Learning Goals, while more boys were working towards the goals.
The six areas of learning covering children's physical, intellectual, emotional and social development were grouped into 13 categories. They showed gaps of 12 or 13 percentage points between girls and boys in the personal, social and emotional development categories, and a 12-point difference in their writing ability.
But Pauline Trudell, spokeswoman for Early Education, said that the results should be 'taken with a pinch of salt'. She said, 'The Foundation Stage Profile was never meant to be used in this way. This is an uneasy compromise between early educationalists' desire to have a system of formative assessment throughout the Foundation Stage, and the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority, which wanted a numerical score for children based on a scales booklet.
'The result of this compromise is fairly meaningless data. The Foundation Stage Profile is meant to be a cumulative record starting in the nursery and continuing through the reception year. Because children come from a range of settings into reception class, there will be a variability of what information the reception class teacher will inherit.
'There is also the fact that reception class teachers have not had sufficient training in observation and the analysis of observation, and how to manage it with short staffing. So under all these circumstances, the evidence on which to base an assessment is bound to be unsound.'
Even the Department for Education and Skills sought to distance itself from the results, describing them as 'experimental statistics' that 'should be treated with caution'.
In a statement, the DfES said, 'We know some of the data to be of poor quality and completeness, although we are satisfied that these do not affect the results significantly at a national level.'
David Hart, general secretary of the National Association of Head Teachers, said that the Foundation Stage Profile was 'in dire need of a radical overhaul'. He added, 'Early years teachers have been grossly overloaded by a bureaucratic and time-consuming process which has produced results to which the Government has had to attach a health warning.'
However, Ms Trudell said the DfES was 'right to say that this should be treated with caution' and that Mr Hart's comment was 'based on a lack of understanding of how the Foundation Stage Profile has developed'.
She added, 'Headteachers should be putting additional resources into the Foundation Stage in order to achieve the level of record-keeping that will ensure that children learn effectively later on, rather than putting the resources at the top end of the school, which they tend to do.'
