The Department for Education (DfE) had attempted to introduce its contested and controversial Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) for four-year-olds since 2015. Reflecting a wider realisation of the COVID-19 pandemic as a powerful catalyst for ‘re-imagining’ education with digital education technologies, the DfE implemented RBA as a statutory assessment in September 2021.
RBA is an automated national standardised numeracy and literacy test designed to facilitate the measurement of progression across seven years of primary school, and thereby, school accountability.
Teachers receive a series of short, narrative statements about how their pupils performed in the assessment, but otherwise, the school’s results are black boxed until Year 6, when their progression rates are measured and compared across those seven years.
Beginning in the summer of 2028, the DfE will use the data to create comparable school-level progression tables showing the progress pupils make. The DfE will publish these comparable datasets, adding to the data available to parents to calculate from when choosing a primary school.
