Plans for EYFS league tables abolished

I’m sure that early years practitioners up and down the country are breathing a collective sigh of relief this week after the announcement that plans to publish the Early Years Foundation Stage profiles of each school at school level have been abolished. EYFS profiles consist of assessments of each child’s performance in 13 different areas.

They are currently published at local authority and school level but following significant criticism from teaching unions and a petition of almost 1000 signatures, the Department for Education has announced that they will no longer seek to publish a league table of each school’s individual performance.

Without going in to the debate about the benefits of standardised testing and league tables in general, I think this u-turn does seem like a positive thing.  Its hard to see how publishing a league table of the educational performance of 5 year olds would do anything other than put children under unnecessary pressure and create a rigid and tense learning environment.