You are going to read a newspaper article on education. Read the text and answer the questions that follow. Decide whether each statement is True or False and provide your arguments drawn from the text to justify your choice. The proof should be given in your own words.
I believe we should seriously consider assessing children on entry to primary school. Every school already assesses children as they enter compulsory education. It is part of effective planning to meet each child’s needs. The question is whether it should play a formal role in the education system.
I firmly believe that the performance of schools should be measured in terms of progress; the distance travelled from when a child arrives at the school and when they leave. To use the jargon, this is the “value” that a school adds.
In order to measure progress, you need a baseline. You need to know where a child started from. Today this baseline is set at the age of seven, three years after a child starts school. This means that all the effort and investment that takes place in the early years – a pivotal, crucial age – is wasted in measuring a school’s performance.
This system makes no sense to me, and the incentives are not convincing. It’s hard to see how the results of a baseline on entry could be held against a school. A low set of results merely indicates that the school serves an especially challenging intake. Tests at seven, by contrast, do become a judgment on the school’s performance at key stage one.
What of the interests of the child? Early assessment of need and intervention are usually seen as central to their interests, but two possible objections arise – age variability, and the cruelty of testing.
A valid case could be made to allow children to settle in and get used to an institutional setting. However, I would suggest that the fact that a child is unsettled in a school setting is a rather important piece of baseline data.
The issue of age, however, is valid. In reception classes, the age difference between summer born and winter born children can be as much as a quarter of their lifespan. That will make a big difference and any assessments should be age adjusted to take this into account. This is a feasible modification.
Any assessment of young children must be administered by teachers. It cannot be a formal exam. It can be quite structured, but a teacher will need to manage a child’s attention and concentration, picking the right moment. A teacher can also handle this sensitively and build the child’s confidence.
In our conversations about assessment, we too often slip into the idea of baseline measures as a predictor of future of attainment. This seems to me to be quite sad. If a baseline is seen as a measure of the starting point and a recognition of the scale of the task, then that is more fruitful. Surely our goal is to confound and exceed predictions, not to fulfil them? A child’s attainment at four or five is not a measure of their potential but an indicator of the amount of help and support they require.
1-5. Choose whether the statements are True (T) or False (F) and, to justify your choice, provide your proof from the text in your own words.
Example : (0) The statement is true because the narrator has never read a single book in the original and has not demonstrated any interest in the subject.
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1. To assess children when they start attending primary school is important, according to the author, because it will give the bigger picture of what has been achieved.
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2. The fact that their pupils in reception do not do well in the initial test should be taken as a failure by a school.
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3. The main condition for an effective assessment of young children is good timing.
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4. From the very start young children should be introduced to the official rules and regulations of their school.
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5. The emphasis in the assessment of young children should be shifted from what is wrong with them towards what should be done to improve their skills.
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