Assessment
Assessments
All children are assessed against end of year expectations for their age group. For more information please follow the links below for the relevant year group.
Assessment in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
How We Assess in Early Years
Assessment in the Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) is ongoing, practical and rooted in children’s everyday experiences. It is not based on formal testing. Instead, practitioners build an accurate picture of each child’s development through:
- Careful observations during play and adult-led activities
- Meaningful interactions and conversations
- Reviewing children’s work and achievements
- Discussions with parents and carers
- Professional knowledge of child development
Assessment is used to identify children’s strengths, next steps and any areas where additional support may be needed. It informs our planning and ensures every child is supported to make good progress.
What is the Good Level of Development (GLD)?
At the end of Reception, children are assessed against the Early Learning Goals (ELGs) within the EYFS framework.
A child is said to have achieved a Good Level of Development (GLD) if they meet the expected level in:
- The three Prime Areas:
- Communication and Language
- Physical Development
- Personal, Social and Emotional Development
- And the two Specific Areas:
- Literacy
- Mathematics
The ELGs in Understanding the World and Expressive Arts and Design are also assessed and reported to parents, but they are not included in the GLD measure.
Children are assessed as either:
- Emerging – not yet meeting the expected level of development
- Expected – meeting the expected level of development
The GLD provides a national benchmark and helps ensure children are well prepared for the transition into Year 1.
Year 1 Phonics
Phonics is one of the strategies that children are taught to help them to learn to read. We teach the children the individual letter sounds, the sounds of combinations of letters and how to blend these sounds to make words. In the statutory assessment task, each child is given 40 words to read. Some of these are real words and others are pseudo words (alien words). The expected level of achievement is for a child to be able to read 32 or more of the real and pseudo words. However, phonics isn’t the only strategy that children use to help them to read. They also make use of picture clues, grammatical clues, words that they recognise by sight and their understanding of the text. Our ongoing assessment of the children’s reading considers all of these skills and helps us to tailor the curriculum to each child’s needs. This is particularly important as some children may achieve the expected level in the phonics assessment but not be strong readers because one or more of their other reading skills is weak. Similarly, a few children may be able to achieve a good level in reading, while not having strong phonic skills. Our ongoing assessment of your child’s reading will ensure that your child’s particular areas of weakness continue to be known and addressed by the class teacher.
Year 2 End of Key Stage 1 Assessments
The end of the summer term of Year 2 marks the end of a child’s time in Key Stage 1. To inform parents of the progress that their child has made during Key Stage 1 (Year 1 and 2) all pupils are assessed against end of year expectations in reading, writing, mathematics and science. The assessments are based on the teacher’s on-going assessment of each child’s performance in class. However, all children in England also undertake written standardised tasks in reading, spelling punctuation and grammar and mathematics which support the teachers’ assessments and ensure accuracy. The assessments also help schools to judge how well their pupils are performing in comparison with pupils nationally.