Should Assessment Happen in the Early Years?

It has been argued that children under four should not have to be academically assessed and should be left to just be themselves, not being pushed to meet guidelines or to learn academic skills at such a young age. The Early Years Curriculum was referred to as the ‘nappy curriculum’ in media when it was first issued, Dorothy Lepkowska explained in her Guardian article in 2011, and that specialists argued that children need time to develop before being put under a ‘stream of observations and assessments’. (Lepkowska, 2011). Lepkowska explains that she agreed that assessing children of under four years of age seemed ‘ridiculous’, but as soon as she attended the first parents evening at her ten months old nursery, she changed her mind.  Seeing that all observations linked to every aspect of her learning, at that she could now see what level her daughter was working at and it was ‘a revelation, and a wonderful insight into the part of Daria's life that was hers alone.’ (Lepkowska, 2011). Lepkowska’s only complaint was that practitioners may be taking too much time to observe and assess children rather than paying attention to them.