Parents and Teachers for Excellence wants EYFS to support the phonics check
A group campaigning for a knowledge-led curriculum has claimed the early years reading assessment is “simply not working”.
In its response to the government’s consultation on primary assessment, the Parents and Teachers for Excellence (PTE) group called for a review of how the early years foundation stage (EYFS) framework covers literacy and reading.
The organisation looked at the proportion of children in reception achieving the EYFS expected standard in reading in every local authority in England, based on teacher assessments.
It then compared this with the proportion reaching the expected standard in the phonics check the following year.
For each of the three sets of data it analysed, PTE’s incoming director Mark Lehain said there was “zero correlation”, which he said suggested the reading element of the EYFS framework was not preparing children well enough to read at school.
In its submission to the DfE consultation, which closed yesterday, it said its data “clearly shows that the reading portion of the test is simply not working” and “must not be evaluating children’s reading ability accurately”.
PTE called for the EYFS to be re-evaluated to support the phonics check, and to rely less on “unreliable” teacher assessments.
The academic year my daughter was three she attended two different nursery settings. She took away two quite different EYFS assessments, one from each setting, at the end of the year. The disagreement between these was not a one off mistake or due to incompetence but inevitable because EYFS assessment does not meet the basic requirements of effective assessment – that it should be reliable and valid*.
We have a very well researched principles to guide educational assessment and these principles can and should be applied to the ‘Early Years Foundation Stage Profile’. This is the statutory assessment used nationally to assess the learning of children up to the age of 5. The purpose of the EYFS assessment profile is summative:
‘To provide an accurate national data set relating to levels of child development at the end of EYFS’
It is also used to ‘accurately inform parents about their child’s development’. The EYFS profile is not fit for these purposes and its weaknesses are exposed when it is judged using standard principles of assessment design.
EYFS profiles are created by teachers when children are 5 to report on their progress against 17 early learning goals and describe the ‘characteristics of their learning’. The assessment is through teacher observation. The profile guidance stresses that,
‘…to accurately assess these characteristics, practitioners need to observe learning which children have initiated rather than focusing on what children do when prompted.’
We believe that every school child should have an excellent education and great prospects - regardless of where they live or how much their parents earn. We believe it is unacceptable that top Universities and the most prestigious jobs are dominated by those that went to private schools. Addressing that issue does not mean taking action against those that have attended private schools. Instead, we must create a state education system of such quality that makes such expensive schools pointless and therefore redundant. The best schools can and should be in the state sector. The question is: how do we get there?
