Headteacher Blogger, Michael Tidd, writes very sensible posts in my opinion. I myself have written about the crazy assessment regimes in England's early years. That's perhaps why I couldn't resist starting a thread about this issue!
'Plenty of schools are still ticking endless boxes'
For many staff, the tracking workload has decreased in recent years. So why haven't early years teachers benefited?
It’s particularly odd given the levels of opposition to the Reception baseline. Twenty minutes of one-to-one assessment of actual skills seems no bad thing to me, compared with the endless labelling of children against the vague descriptors of the Development Matters framework. And to imagine that such a decision is necessary against 17 different areas seems even madder.
There’s no doubt that the structure of early years classrooms and the staffing of them allow early years specialists to know their children well. Can’t we just take that as read, drop all the highlighting, tick-boxing and tracking and just let them get on with engaging with the children?