Initial Assessment

In my post about Transition into the EYFS, I talked about getting as much information as you can from any pre-school setting (s) that the children have attended. No matter how much information you get though, it's really important to carry out your own detailed initial assessments. It should become the basis of everything you do for the rest of the year.

Top 5 tips for initial assessment

1- Baseline Assessment
This September was meant to be the first year of the official baseline assessment. Schools had a chance to trial the available assessments last year ready for 2016. BUT... the government has decided to scrap the baseline assessment as the different types are not comparable and it can't be used to track progress across all schools. That doesn't mean that you can't still use them for in house assessment. We trialed 2 of the different baselines available last year and will again be using one of them this year.

• NFER- we used this practical baseline assessment with all of our EYFS children last year. I chose it because of the practical nature using real resources as well as pictures. It gave us a clear idea of what the children could and could not do on entry and helped us to know where to go next. I was able to decide if the children needed to continue with a section or if I had seen enough and we were able to stop at any time to suit the needs of the children.
• CEM Base- we used this computer based assessment with a few children as a comparison. I chose it to see if the computer based system would be more engaging for the children. In truth, the opposite seemed to be true, and the children that tried it were not that keen. I also found it to be very repetitive for example, when assessing the children's ability to recognise letters, I expected it to check a few from throughout the alphabet and use that as a basis for the assessment but NO! It asked the child to go through every letter in both lower case and then upper case for sounds and then letter names. Yes it is important to be thorough but I don't think we need to go through all 26 letters (twice) and then digraphs to know whether a child can recognise letters or not. This was just one part of the assessment and both the children, and myself, were bored by the end of just that section.
• Early Excellence- many of my colleagues in other schools chose this option as it was considered the most child friendly. No formal sit down 'testing' but based on adult observations. We chose not to go with this option ourselves as we felt that it was very much like what we did anyway so what was the point of paying for it.

This year we will again use the NFER resources as a formal baseline assessment of every child.

2- Focused Observations

In the first half term, we carry out at least 2 focused observations of each child. This gives us a chance to follow their child initiated play and make some initial observations mainly for PSED & CLL scale points and others dependent on the sort of activities they choose. We use these observations to add to our other initial assessments.

3- Playing with the children

Sometimes I think that the most easily overlooked aspect of initial assessments is simply being brave enough to spend time playing with the children. I have to make time in my timetable for this each week otherwise I find myself spending more time sitting back and watching (which is worthwhile) rather than getting involved. The difficulty with this is in trying not to take over and letting the children lead what happens otherwise your observations can be skewed.

4- Whole class activities

We always carry out some whole class activities as a way of initially assessing the children, particularly for phase 1 phonic skills and maths. I use my TA to take notes as I lead the session, giving us an idea of what the children are already capable of.

5- Recording initial assessments

This year I have created a proforma with a page for each of the 17 ELG's. I have copied all of the statements from the 30-50 and 40-60+ age bands (not including the ELG's) and created a simple tick list, with the children's names along the top. My plan is to use this with my TA to keep a simple record of what the children can and can not do. I will use this to collate all of the information we get from the different ways of assessing the children to create a really clear picture of where they are, ages & stage wise, on entry. This data will then be recorded onto their individual tracking sheets that I will talk about more in my 'Progress Tracking' post.

To me, most of these ideas are just common sense and I'm sure it's what most people are doing anyway but I try never to assume!