This is the first in a series of posts explaining the key statutory assessments in England. We start with the Reception Baseline Assessment.
In summary:
The Department for Education (DfE) introduced the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) in September 2021. Schools with children joining Reception classes (those who will be five years old between 1 September and 31 August) must administer the RBA within the first six weeks of each child starting Reception.
The RBA is administered by an adult known to the child, who works one-on-one with children who are being assessed.
The results of the assessment will be used as a baseline in the Primary Progress calculations for a school from 2027/28 (the current year 5), replacing Key Stage 1 assessments which will be used as a baseline for the last time in 2026/27 (i.e. the current year 6).
What is the purpose of the RBA?
The RBA creates a baseline measure from which progress between Reception to the end of key stage 2 (KS2) can be calculated. It is not intended as a diagnostic tool for schools, to measure Early Years, or to provide detailed diagnostc information to staff working in schools. The DfE advise that it should not replace any non-statutory assessments which schools choose to administer for their own use.
The RBA was developed to replace Key Stage 1 assessments, which are the basis of Primary progress measures until 2026/27. The DfE argued that using KS1 Assessments at the end of Year 2 as the baseline for Primary Progress calculations had two key limitations.
Firstly, using KS1 as a baseline did not credit schools for work done in Reception, Year 1 and Year 2, and secondly, using teacher assessments at KS1 was, in the words of the DfE, ‘problematic’.
The RBA is therefore explicitly a process to create a numerical summary of a child to be used in the school accountability system.
Which areas of learning and development does the RBA use to assess children?
Whilst the RBA does not assess learning and development, it uses a content domain based on knowledge skills and understanding a Reception-age child might be expected to have developed before starting school.
The specification for the RBA outlines the content domain which the RBA assesses. Whilst it is linked to the learning and development in early mathematics and early literacy, communication and language (LCL) requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS), it is should be noted that, because of the nature of the RBA, not all areas of the learning and development domain specified are used to create the RBA score for a given child.
This is because the RBA is time-limited, with a necessarily limited number of assessed items, taking at most 20 minutes per child.
How does the RBA work in practice?
When a child starts reception, within six weeks they must be assessed via the RBA. The assessment is administered digitally using two devices. An adult uses a PC or tablet and the child uses a tablet or an interactive whiteboard or equivalent.
It should be noted that not all children start reception in the Autumn term. Children must have started full-time education in the term they reach ‘compulsory school age’. In practice, this means Autumn born 5-year-olds must start in the Autumn term, Spring born by Spring and Summer born by Summer. Some children may therefore complete the RBA in the first six weeks of the Spring or the Summer term.
There are, as noted, two components of the RBA, Mathematics and LCL. For both components of the assessment, pupils can respond by using a touchscreen, speaking to the adult assessor, or by using toy bears for some of the maths elements. Some questions are marked automatically and other are marked by the adult administrator.
The maximum score on the RBA is 40. Whilst the RBA is not fully adaptive, some of the items may not be presented to a child if their previous answers suggest they may not answer more difficult questions. The official guidance advises that each pupil will have the opportunity to score at least 31 marks.
It should be noted that those administering the assessment will not know or be able to calculate the score any child records. This is because some answers are marked automatically, and because the weighting of answers (the precise number of marks or part marks for each question) is not available, making calculation impossible.
Additionally, the results of the RBA are ‘black boxed’ and schools and other agencies including Ofsted are not given the scores. This because the numerical results are solely used to create the baseline for the Primary Progress measure calculated from the start of Reception to May of Year 6, which James Pembroke discussed here.
What do schools get from the process?
Whilst schools do not get the RBA numerical scores, they are given ‘narrative statements’, which ‘provide a snapshot of a pupil’s performance when the assessment was completed’.
The narrative statements are linked to content domain and are simple indications as to whether the child ‘showed’, ‘recognised’ or ‘used’ a particular aspect of the domain.
The narrative statements were created late in the development process, after schools had asked for feedback from the assessment which was not part of the initial assessment design.
Ultimately, the RBA is designed to be part of the school accountability structure and not for use by schools or those working in them.
This being the case, schools are probably best to regard the RBA as a necessary administrative task and to make their own assessments of new starters in Reception in whatever way they find useful to make decisions to support their own learners.
It is worth reiterating that, because RBA scores are not available to schools, Insight cannot import them into the system.
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