Education unions urge caution on new school data
Leading teaching and education unions have warned that the Foundation Stage Profile results- data for five year olds- is unreliable.
The general secretary of the Association of Teachers and Lecturers (ATL) said serious questions must be asked about Government’s decision to publish experimental data from the Foundation Stage Profile.
This data assesses the progress and learning of five year olds in England, and was carried out in 2003 as a pilot.
Reception class teachers were asked to grade the children on a variety of categories including personal and social development as well as more traditional categories like reading and writing.
The results have not been broken down by school or local authority and only give a snapshot of the country as a whole. However, girls are shown to exceed boys in all categories.
Dr Mary Bousted said: “This data is unreliable and unhelpful. The profile was implemented inconsistently because teachers received material, training and moderation at different times.
“Publishing data from a pilot year is an unnecessary pressure on teachers who are doing their best to implement a new system under difficult circumstances.
“ATL questions the financial costs of producing data that will not be useful to either parents or a child’s next teacher.”
David Hart, general secretary of NAHT said: “The Foundation Stage Profile is in dire need of a radical overhaul. Early Years teachers have been grossly overloaded by a bureaucratic and time-consuming process which has produced results to which the Government has had to attach a health warning.
“The net result is that we have a set of statistics that gives us only one really significant piece of information, namely that boys not only under-achieve in secondary and primary education, but also at the earlier stage in their school careers.”
Phil Willis, Liberal Democrat education spokesman, said that he had concerns about the philosophy behind collecting such data.
Mr Willis said: “The biggest concern of five year olds should be playing and having fun. Now 36,000 of them are being told that they haven’t reached the mark when it comes to ‘having knowledge and understanding of the world’.
“Ministers have become so obsessed with testing that they have forgotten how valuable learning through play is for a child.”
