EYFS assessment

EYFS assessment

We have updated the assessment areas of learning on Maestro to reflect the government changes in the revised Early Learning Goals (ELGs) and best practice from 2021. Any historical individual assessments against old criteria have been migrated to the corresponding new areas or sub-categories within an area.

Making assessments

Maestro is fully in line with the ELGs that children are judged against at the end of Reception. Throughout the EYFS, teachers can assess whether or not children are on track as they progress through their curriculum in order to reach the expected standards.

Progress towards this can be recorded against the seven Areas of Learning or directly against the seventeen ELG sub-categories within those areas. We advise this to be a simple On track or Not on track judgement during autumn and spring and then, to support future teaching and learning, a more detailed, granular assessment during the summer. The summer assessment will feed in to the forthcoming EYFSP report (1 = Emerging, 2 = Expected, A = Not assessed) that will support schools in reporting any statutory data requirements.

Alert To ensure continuity between EYFS and KS1, maths is categorised as a Primary subject.
Where additional knowledge and skills within an Area of Learning have been utilised for activities to ensure appropriate progression and development, these have been categorised as Breadth within an area of learning.

 All of this ensures learning towards the ELGs through a knowledge and skills framework that expands on the Development Matters framework and seamlessly progresses into KS1 and all the way through to UKS2.

Characteristics of learning

Teachers can also make judgements of individual children’s progress against the characteristics of learning, as referred to in the EYFS framework,

In planning and guiding what children learn, practitioners must reflect on the different rates at which children are developing and adjust their practice appropriately. Three characteristics of effective teaching and learning are:

• playing and exploring - children investigate and experience things, and ‘have a go’
• active learning - children concentrate and keep on trying if they encounter difficulties, and enjoy achievements
• creating and thinking critically - children have and develop their own ideas, make links between ideas, and develop strategies for doing things

Info
Please do not hesitate to contact us for further support with any questions you may have about assessment.

Further reading

  1. Teaching Approaches in the Early Years - Part 1
  2. Teaching Approaches in the Early Years – Part 2 
  3. Inspection and the early years’ curriculum – a guide for practitioners in the EYFS

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