This article explores the importance of building on children’s starting points in the early years and the role of the Reception Baseline Assessment. 

Whether you’re welcoming a new cohort or reflecting mid-year, one thing remains constant in the Early Years: understanding and responding to children’s starting points is fundamental. It’s not just something we do at the beginning of the year – it’s an ongoing process that underpins everything we do to support learning and development. 

From the moment children join our school or setting, we begin the important work of getting to know them as individuals. We observe how they learn, what captures their interest, their home lives, wellbeing, prior experiences, and any potential gaps in their understanding. These early insights help shape the path ahead – but only if we use that information meaningfully to plan and adapt our teaching and provision. 

In a time when schemes of work increasingly dominate school curricula – including in early years classrooms – it’s more important than ever to keep our focus rooted in the child. Planning must always begin with the individual child and their starting points. When we start anywhere else, we risk overlooking critical gaps or failing to nurture key dispositions and skills. True progress happens when we meet children where they are and build from there.  

The Importance of Assessing Starting Points 

Assessing and understanding children’s starting points is a vital part of children’s first few weeks and it helps to nurture a successful Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) journey. It lays the foundation for effective planning and ensures each child’s unique needs are met. 

In the EYFS, children enter our classrooms with diverse backgrounds, skills, and understanding of the world around them. By starting with our knowledge of the individual child, we gain a clear picture of where they stand in their learning journey so far. This knowledge can empower us, enabling us to plan challenging provision and teaching that match children’s capabilities and build upon what they already know. 

For schools with Reception-aged children, the Reception Baseline Assessment (RBA) is a statutory requirement and provides a national snapshot of children’s early literacy, communication and mathematical skills. However, while the RBA offers valuable benchmarking information, it is not designed to inform day-to-day teaching or planning. 

That’s why the practitioner-led baseline assessment remains absolutely essential. It allows educators to gather a rich, holistic understanding of each child through observation, interaction and ongoing reflection. These practitioner assessments go beyond isolated skills – they help us understand each child’s wellbeing, interests, approaches to learning, and the context of their development. When combined with the RBA, they provide a comprehensive view of the child that can inform meaningful planning and ensure learning is pitched appropriately from the very start. 

Explore the Early Excellence EExRec Baseline Assessment Tool to get started with your practitioner-led baseline assessment. 

Shaping the Curriculum 

What we do with the baseline information next is crucial. From experience, baseline observations can sometimes sit in folders, hidden in cupboards and often aren’t looked at afterwards or even ever! But the key reason we carry out these baselines is to gather information and analyse children’s starting points and then crucially, use this to tailor planning going forward. 

In Part 1 of Ofsted’s research into Early Years (Best Start in life part 1: setting the scene), Ofsted state, ‘When considering the curriculum in the early years, it is important to think about the knowledge that children may already have. Effective practitioners do not make assumptions about the kind of knowledge that children may bring with them from home.’ 

The tricky bit isn’t usually the observations of learning and development, rather it is the analysis part. An observation on its own just provides us with information about what a child is doing or can do. But it’s the analysis that is important: what does the observation tell you about the child’s learning and development and how significant is this information? 

To be able to carry out the analysis part effectively, practitioners must have a good understanding of children’s ‘typical’ development as this will help you to understand the significance of what you are observing. 

Alongside the Early Excellence EExRec Baseline Assessment Tool, both Development Matters and the Birth to Five Matters non-statutory documentation are valuable resources which will support you and other practitioners in understanding child development and also in identifying the subsequent steps in children’s learning. Both tools offer distinctive approaches and are useful in the analysis process as they help to connect children’s development to the areas of learning within the EYFS and also to the Characteristics of Effective Teaching and Learning.  It would be worthwhile to explore both of these and perhaps gather a collection of resources that provide guidance on typical developmental stages in order to support you in analysing children’s starting points. Be careful that you don’t use these tools as ‘checklists’. They are there to help you with analysing and planning ahead for the children in your class and they should not be used as an assessment checklist.  

Ensuring Progress 

No two children are the same, and therefore starting with ‘Week 1’ of a prescribed maths scheme for example, will be challenging for many children as they will have very different starting points. Some may come with prior knowledge and skills, while others might never have come across a concept or may have gaps in their understanding. By analysing baseline assessments, we can identify these gaps quickly and develop targeted teaching to meet the needs of the children. 

The aim is to be able to tailor our continuous provision and implement strategic teaching methods to bridge the knowledge gaps effectively and ensure we are not building on foundations of sand. Formal interventions shouldn’t be seen as the only solution to support or challenge children, and neither should prescribed schemes of work. What we should be doing first is addressing the quality of our teaching and the quality of our continuous provision to ensure it meets the needs and stretches just beyond children’s starting points. To do this, we must first focus on those starting points and glean that crucial information about how to shape our curriculum and learning experiences. 

For more support in carrying out your practitioner-led baseline, explore the Early Excellence EExRec Baseline Assessment Tool today. 

Things to consider… 

• How confident are you and your team in observing and analysing children’s starting points? 

• Is there a detailed and consistent understanding of child development across the team? 

• Do you draw on a bank of resources to help support practitioner knowledge of child development? 

• Do your observations of children’s starting points inform your planning, changes to your provision and the role of the adult?