Government’s �10 million baseline assessment contract struggling to attract takers?

Is this how baseline assessment providers reacting to the DfE's proposed test contract?

Are all three providers who have run baseline assessment systems in primary schools about to reject the chance of a £9.8 million contract to operate tests for five-year-olds from 2020?

The question raises itself amid some doubts about any of the three bidding, and with trials of the new assessment in literacy, numeracy and possibly aspects of pupil behaviour supposed to start next academic year.

Early Excellence, the firm which has operated an observational-based assessment system for which three quarters of schools opted, when given a choice of providers in 2015, ruled itself out shortly after the contract was announced in November.

Memorably, the company described at the time the government’s proposals as “self-contradictory, incoherent, unworkable and ultimately inaccurate, invalid and unusable.” (Apart from these issues, the tests were all good, apparently…)

Jan Dubiel, the firm’s head of national and international development, re-iterated this stance in a Schools Week profile last week in which he also memorably suggested the understanding of early years of the schools minister, Nick Gibb, was “at an early stage of development”.

Now it seems that both of the other bodies which won the right to do baseline assessment in 2015 may have reservations about the new system.

In a Guardian article last week, it was reported that Durham University’s centre for evaluation and monitoring (CEM), is “unlikely to bid for the new tender”, with the fact that the DfE bid document says that results will not be used “formatively”, to help teachers improve the development of pupils, seemingly central.

CEM’s Katharine Bailey told the Guardian: “We think there is an opportunity to give valuable information to teachers with these assessments and we think that now isn’t going to happen. If teachers aren’t given helpful and beneficial results that can help children, it’s verging on the immoral.”

CEM did not respond to a request to elaborate further when we asked.

But Education Uncovered has also been told by a well-placed source that the third organisation, the National Foundation for Education Research, would not be bidding either. Our mole, admittedly, was not inside the organisation and the NFER issued only a non-committal statement when it was asked.

Carole Willis, NFER’s chief executive, told us that its experience providing baseline had been “very positive”, but then added merely that “We are reviewing the detail of the DfE tender and evaluating whether a valid and reliable assessment can be delivered to the specification.”

It is remarkable, perhaps, that such a document can have been put out by the government with, two months after its publication, questions still remaining over validity and reliability. Indeed, Willis’s statement implies, perhaps, another line of scepticism in addition to CEM’s complaint about the tests’ non-use formatively by teachers.

It would be even more remarkable, given the size of the tender, if all three providers were to decide to give it a miss.

Ruth Miskin’s accounts

The ever-controversial Ruth Miskin, former partner of the late Chris Woodhead and the operator of a much-discussed phonics teaching system who has been very close to policy development at the Department for Education, was at the centre of another intense debate on social media last night.

Miskin spoke at a training event for Her Majesty’s Inspectors, Ofsted’s social media face Sean Harford tweeted, prompting questions about whether other perspectives on early education were available and more concerns about the closeness of the inspectorate to government.

Miskin’s closeness to the DfE and her ability to benefit from it commercially are much-discussed. But how much does she earn?

A definitive answer is difficult, as her main company, RM Literacy Limited, is allowed to publish only “filleted” accounts as a small entity under companies law.

However, the most recent accounts, filed in March last year, state that the company had £3.86m in shareholders’ fund, which was almost £500,000 more than the previous year. Miskin is listed in a documented filed two years ago as the only shareholder.

The company also owed Miskin herself £1.05 million. Quite a sum.

Moscow wants a PISA the action

Also yesterday, I found myself at BETT, the annual ed tech jamboree at London’s Excel Centre which seems to get bigger every year, with attendees including influential policymakers from around the world.

Indeed, the event’s global reach seemed confirmed by the presence of an interesting stand, operated by none other than the Moscow City Department for Education, which seemed to be promoting the schools success of one of Europe’s largest metropolises.

Even more intriguingly, a leaflet I picked up from the stand states: “The high standards of Moscow school education have been confirmed by international rankings.

“According to the [Organisation for Economic Co-operation and Development’s] latest PISA survey, Moscow school education ranked sixth in the world in terms of student literacy and math skill in 2016.”

“Eh?” I thought. As far as I was aware, Moscow’s results were not reported separately in the latest round of PISA tests for 15-year-olds, which are used for the highest-profile rankings of (in most cases) national education systems, but which in any case took place in 2015, rather than 2016.

Investigating, it looks as if the brochure was promoting a slightly different set of PISA results.  The OECD’s “PISA-based Test for Schools” allows different jurisdictions to opt to allow their schools to take tests along the lines of the main PISA study, and to allow those doing so to compare their results against those of nations in the main study.

Moscow is listed on the OECD’s PISA website as one of five jurisdictions taking part in the “PISA-based Test for Schools”, another being the UK.

The OECD’s website adds that “the PISA-based test for schools is designed to provide results for individual schools and not to provide aggregate national or system-level results”.

Is it legitimate, then, to compare this city’s results to those of nations in the main PISA study? I’ve asked the OECD, but at the time of writing had yet to receive a direct answer.

Postscript:

The OECD has now got back with a response. Here it is:

“The PISA-based Test for Schools is an assessment that was developed by the OECD that is based upon PISA methodology and PISA’s definition of competency. Unlike PISA, the audience for the PISA-based Test for schools is individual schools, not entire countries. Results of the PISA-based Test for Schools are delivered on the same scales as PISA, and thus are comparable to PISA results.

 The PISA-based Test for Schools is not designed to rank the performance of participating schools. We provide information and data from the assessment, but how participants compare each other and along which indicators is their prerogative. Furthermore, in PISA and PISA-based Test for Schools reports, all data and results are provided alongside their respective statistical errors. The reports stress that it is important to consider this information when comparing two sets of results.

 Because participants of the PISA-based Test for Schools own their data, the OECD is not responsible for how they use and present their results.”