ABSTRACT
Baseline assessment (BA) refers to school entry assessment at ages 4–5, a process which became popular in the UK in the 1990s. Lindsay and Desforges (1998) identified nine purposes of BA, which can be grouped into two major categories: child-focused (pedagogic) and school-focused (managerial). The former concerns the identification of children with difficulties at an early age in order to remediate or at least ameliorate their problems by appropriate teaching. This approach, often called screening, has a long tradition in developmental paediatrics. Educationists initially developed systems to assess 7–8 year-olds when significant problems learning to read were apparent, but subsequently changed focus onto children entering school in order to identify those ‘at risk’ of developing such difficulties.
