DfE planning to spend £10m on Reception baseline test
The new baseline assessments for primary school pupils will cost up to £10 million to develop, the government has revealed.
The Department for Education has also confirmed that it does not want the assessment to be based on teacher observations – the basis of the most popular baseline assessment chosen by teachers in 2015-16.
The information is contained in a tender posted by the DfE for a Reception baseline development contract worth an estimated £9.8 million.
The disclosure comes after Tes revealed that the government estimated it had spent £44 million on the statutory testing system for primary schools in 2016-17.
Mary Bousted, joint general secretary of the National Education Union, told Tes at the time that the current assessment system did not represent value for money and “to seek to introduce two new costly assessments [the baseline and the times tables check] at a time that schools are in the midst of a funding crisis would be a grave error”.
The government has said that if the Reception baseline is introduced, then key stage 1 tests will be scrapped.
The contract to develop the baseline assessment will include any necessary trialling of material in the 2018-19 academic year, followed by a national pilot in the 2019-20 academic year, then two years of statutory delivery of the assessment to all Reception pupils in England in 2020-21 and 2021-22.
Read the full article in the Tes.