The Department for Education (DfE) is making plans to digitalise the reception baseline assessment (RBA) process, under which children beginning primary school will have their capabilities assessed to monitor progress in the following years.
It has completed a scoping exercise and put out a tender for support in a discovery phase looking at the options for a digital service.
The DfE has identified the RBA, which will be managed by its Standards and Testing Agency, as suitable for a digital process, and is aiming to develop and manage a service in-house.
It said the service will need to collate and clean registered pupil data, verify registrations, mark assessments, download data and return results.
Trials of the RBA, which applies four- and five-year-olds entering reception classes, are due to begin next month and it is scheduled to become a requirement for English primary schools from September 2020. It is aimed at filling a gap in the assessment of schools’ performance and will provide a new starting point to measure the progress of individual children.
The long term plan is for the department to use it in publishing details of childrens’ progress through primary schools from 2027.
Image CC.2.0 by Lucélia Ribeiro through flickr
