ABSTRACT
Assessment takes many forms and is used for a variety of purposes in early years education. Fundamentally, assessment is at the heart of the teaching and learning process (Figure 4.1). Practitioners assess children on entry to the nursery school, sometimes with the involvement of parents. This form of assessment, known as formative assessment, and usually involving the observation of children, is part of the teaching and learning cycle mentioned earlier. It is regarded as educationally valid and widely accepted and practiced by practitioners. The value of ongoing formative assessment was a key finding of the five year funded DfES project (Siraj-Blatchford et aI. 2002) identifying the effectiveness of different forms of early years provision. In recent years another dimension to assessment has
emerged that is less popular, although the pragmatic early years professional can articulate and justify why they feel the need to quantify the progress their children make through the nursery or reception class. I refer, of course, to those assessment schemes, of which there are many - PIPS (Performance Indicators in Primary Schools) (Tymms and Merrill 1996), Flying Start (Durham County Council 1999), Infant Index (Desforges and Lindsay 1995), Signposts (Birmingham County Council 1997) - to name but a few, that measure children's knowledge, understanding, abilities and skills at the beginning of their formal education. The assessment information is used formatively in many settings to group children in similar ability I developmental groups for some aspects of learning.
