Baseline assessment for school entrants

In the past, assessment of school entrants has always been an influential process, although it has usually been informal and unrecorded. The provisions for assessment following recent educational reforms in England and Wales lend this process a new importance. Both for individual children and for schools there has been a marked upsurge of interest in establishing a baseline for what is added at school. But assessment on school entry may have other valid purposes. These issues are discussed in the context of a review of six British assessment schemes that are representative of the range of different approaches adopted in recent years ‐‐ All About Me, Bury Infant Check, Buckinghamshire Observation Procedure, Infant Rating Scale, Linguistic Awareness in Reading Readiness, and Profiling, Recording and Observing Competencies and Experiences at the Start of School. The purpose of the review is to establish general principles for evaluating such schemes. Evaluation criteria are proposed under four headings that have been employed previously in appraising methods of assessment of special educational needs ‐‐ theoretical integrity, practical efficacy, equity and accountability. It is argued that the rationale of assessment is not just an issue for the authors of such schemes: staff in schools as users of schemes need to examine their own rationale for carrying out assessment. Assessment on entry to school is most productively considered in the context of curriculum planning in school. Decisions about the context and structure of the curriculum will be bound to affect views on what it would be appropriate to cover in assessment on entry. Moreover, decisions can be taken about whether to cover only some aspects of the curriculum, for example core subjects in the National Curriculum ‐‐ what some might call a ‘narrow’ view of the curriculum ‐‐ or to extend to a ‘wide’ coverage of the curriculum. Baseline assessment, to be effective, will depend on the clarity of curriculum planning, and could itself be used in the service of effective curriculum coverage.