Where is the ethic of care in early childhood summative assessment?

Abstract

In 2015, the British government implemented a national Baseline Assessment policy for children at the start of their Reception Year (aged 4-5 years) in England. Adding further assessment to the national Early Years Foundation Stage, the Baseline policy was predicated on reform for improved school accountability, with a focus on measurement of both children's outcomes and school readiness. This small-scale research study juxtaposes the dominant policy narrative that focuses on assessment for accountability, with the alternative lenses of relational pedagogy and care ethics. The study seeks to establish the extent to which an ethic of care is present or absent in policy texts and teacher talk on summative assessment in the Early Years Foundation Stage. Through a critical discourse analysis of government policy texts and a thematic analysis of teachers' dialogue from a focus group, three analytical themes were identified: accountability, quantification of children's development and the perceived impact of Baseline Assessment. Furthermore, the study explores the possibility that care ethics, while missing from policy, are backgrounded rather than absent in participant teachers' dialogue and classroom life. While acknowledging the limitations of a small focus group and the novelty of the Early Years Foundation Stage Baseline Assessment policy, this study argues for a reorientation of the current 'accountability' discussion to one which foregrounds more care-full relationships in assessment policy and practice. Such a contention has implications beyond the single country focus of this study and contributes to international debate on the importance of care in testing times.

Toward a democracy of translations? Local evaluation actor networks in Finnish early childhood education

“…They also show how translations fail when the actors involved stop acting in the ways in which they have been drilled. As earlier research has identified several consequences of organizational cynicism (Dahlberg and Moss, 2005; see also Archer, 2017;Bradbury, 2012;Grant et al, 2018), we are left wondering what the effects of these developments are in Finnish ECEC.…”

An exploration of factors affecting the baseline assessment scores of children attending morning or afternoon sessions in nursery settings in Wales

“…The debate around early years curricula, what should be assessed, how assessment should be undertaken and the appropriateness and usefulness of baseline assessments, is ongoing in the UK (Deluca and Hughes 2014;Scott 2018;Tindal et al 2015;Jarvis 2017;Archer 2017;Roberts-Holmes and Bradbury 2017). Clearly the outcome of a standardised, summative or centrally administered assessment such as the baseline can only reflect the specific skill or concept that was being assessed, it cannot capture the holistic development and idiosyncratic characteristics of the child.…”