As the title indicates, this chapter is concerned with standards in primary education and it is as well at the outset to be clear about what we mean by that. The word can take on more than one interpretation. On the one hand, standards can be thought of as a level against which one tries to make a judgement. In high jumping terms that would be the height of the bar and the observations of individuals trying to jump over it. In educational terms it would involve ascertaining how many people met or exceeded a certain criterion; but another way of looking at standards is to take them as the level that one has reached. How high can an individual jump? It is that way of thinking about standards which is used in this chapter. Educational standards and judgements about the quality of those standards can be

approached by starting with a description of children. Such an approach might begin with what pupils know and can do when they start primary education, and then be followed with a description of how this progresses as they age. It might also include how their perceptions and attitudes change, as well as other variables. The educationalist can then be left to come to his or her own judgements about quality. Some may argue that the process of schooling is a vital part of quality and that standards and quality should be judged against processes. They would be quite right in pointing to processes as being at the heart of education but in the last analysis, in order to assess that quality, one must look at impact and therefore at change in children. And, of course, anyone’s judgement about quality must involve making decisions, explicitly or implicitly, about what standards are expected or appropriate in order to decide whether what is seen is good or poor. In fact, whenever one makes judgements about quality or standards one makes them against a reference point. There will always be a comparison. This might be a comparison of change over time, or against other countries, other schools or against personal expectations, but the judgements are always comparative. What might a description of what children know and can do when they start school

look like? Figure 17.1 is taken from a study of Scottish children starting school (Merrell and Tymms 2007) and provides a graphical illustration of what we have in mind. It shows both the distribution of pupils and their abilities on the same scale. The enormous variation is apparent and differences between sexes, in social background, and other groupings readily follow. In the longer term it also becomes possible to take such a description and show how what children know and can do changes as they progress through their primary years. The parallel chart for England is almost identical once the halfyear difference in the age of starting school is taken into account. However, the

statutory Foundation Stage Profile, which monitors the progress of children as they move through the Foundation Stage in England, could not be used to generate such detailed objectively based information.