Please find below some information regarding how we will be assessing your child’s progress from September 2021 in line with the introduction of the new statutory framework.

Overview
The Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) is a statutory requirement for all schools from September 2021 and is short, task-based assessment of your child’s early literacy, communication, language and mathematics skills.
The assessment can take place at any point in the first 6 weeks of your child starting Reception. The assessment will form the start of a new measure of how schools are helping pupils to progress between reception and year 6.
Your child does not need to prepare. There is no pass mark or score and your child should not realise they are doing an assessment when completing the activities on the iPad.
Once the RBA is fully established, the intention is to make the key stage 1 national curriculum tests and teacher assessments that children currently take at the end of year 2 non-statutory.

What the assessment involves
During a short one-to-one session with a familiar member of staff, your child will complete a number of practical and interactive tasks.
Children can answer questions verbally, by pointing or moving objects. The assessment has been designed to be inclusive and there are modified materials available – this means it is also accessible for children with special educational needs or disability (SEND) or English as an additional language (EAL). 

What the assessment measures
The tasks are carefully designed to assess early mathematics, literacy, communication and language skills.

What you need to do
You do not need to do anything. Your child is unlikely to even recognise that they are doing an assessment when they are completing the tasks.

Why the assessment is being introduced
The purpose of the assessment is to provide a clear starting point to measure the progress a school makes with their pupils throughout their journey throughout primary school, between reception and year 6.

How the data will be used?
Children will not ‘pass’ or ‘fail’ the assessment; instead it will provide a snapshot of where they are when they start school in the reception year. The results of the assessment will not be used by government to track or label individual pupils, or to judge the performance of early years’ settings.
The data from the assessment will only be used at school level to measure the progress of the year group from reception to year 6. The data from the assessment, including numerical scores, will not be shared with parents, pupils, teachers, or external bodies, including schools. There will be no published score.

The RBA privacy notices explain what personal data is collected and how this is processed, including your child’s data.

What will be reported to you
Teachers will receive narrative statements detailing the outcomes for each child, which will tell them how your child performed in the assessment. Schools are not obliged to report the narrative statements to you as a matter of course. However, schools must share the narrative statements with you upon your request.