Primary education services

Tender description

The Department for Education intends to run a competitive procurement process for the development and delivery of an assessment for Reception aged children to baseline their prior attainment at their point of entry to the English schools system (a Reception Baseline Assessment). The Government response to the 2017 Primary Assessment Consultation proposed the introduction of a new assessment in reception to be used to establish pupils' prior attainment as the starting point for calculating school level progress measures when pupils reach the end of key stage 2 (KS2). The target date to introduce this new baseline as a statutory assessment for all English state-funded primary schools is September 2020. The assessment will measure reception age children within the first half term of entering a school in England and provide the starting point for the progress measure that will be used for school accountability. This procurement seeks to award a contract to an organisation or consortia of organisations to develop and deliver the reception baseline assessment. The duration of the contract will cover: any necessary trialling of the material in the 2018/19 academic year; a national pilot in the 2019/20 academic year for the September intake, as well as for schools that have intakes in January and April; and then 2 years of statutory delivery of the assessment to all reception pupils in England in the academic years 2020/21 and 2021/22. The Department may extend the contract for one further academic year until 31.8.2023. Suppliers may plan to adapt an existing assessment or develop an entirely new one as long as they can meet the delivery timeline requirements. The assessment should include an age-appropriate assessment of communication, language and literacy as well as mathematics and should be clearly linked to the learning and development requirements of the Early Years Foundation Stage. We will also ask potential suppliers to explore ways in which it would be possible to assess some form of ‘self regulation’ in their bids, for example persistence with a task or following multi-step instructions. The pupil's regular teacher or teaching assistant will carry out and mediate the assessment. We do not intend this to be an observational assessment which is carried out over time, like the Early Years Foundation Stage Profile (EYFSP). The reception baseline assessment is not intended to provide on-going formative information for practitioners. The Government response to the 2017 Primary Assessment Consultation in England announced that the EYFSP will be revised and will continue to be used; the on-going completion of that assessment will serve this formative purpose. Bidders for this contract will have to demonstrate how their proposed reception baseline assessment meets the areas for evaluation described in the Invitation to Tender documentation and also provides a value for money assessment for schools.