Mandy Pierlejewski, Guy Roberts-Holmes, Sara Hawley and Jennifer Holly
In October last year, a few short weeks into the new school term, colleagues from University College London and Leeds Beckett University visited reception classes in two schools in England. This class is the final year of early childhood education which, in England, takes place in school. We were there to research the reception baseline assessment (RBA)
For some of the most tested children in the world, the first 6 weeks of school are dominated by a statutory, national and standardised digitally-based assessment of communication and language, literacy and maths skills. It includes two components- a set of practical tasks and an online scoring system which algorithmically guides children through the test. The purpose of the test is not to support teachers in planning appropriate learning opportunities for the youngest children in the school but to provide the Department for Education with data “to create school-level progress measures for primary schools, which will show the progress of pupils from reception until the end of key stage 2 (age 11) (Standards and Testing Agency, 2024). The test is therefore purely to be used for accountability purposes.
Our research used a combination of interview data from teachers and teaching assistants and video recordings of 5 children performing the RBA in two contrasting schools. One was an inner city school in London and the other a rural school in Yorkshire. We analysed the video data using multimodal discourse analysis (MDA) which looked at the gesture, spatial positioning, haptics (touch) and verbal communication of the participants. The interview data was analysed using Foucauldian discourse analysis (FDA), a form of discourse analysis which focuses on the operation of power and constructions of truths.
The main findings from this study were that children found the test to be a stressful and painful process. We could clearly see this in the MDA which showed children self-soothing through stroking their heads, pulling their ears, pulling fingers, putting their hands over their ears and leaning away from the teacher. They clearly knew they were being tested and demonstrated their negative feelings about this through their bodies. The interview data also showed teachers aware of the children’s negative experience of the test:
Linda (teacher): “I think they feel like it is a test and you can tell that because they’re not looking at you, or they’re not as affectionate, or they’re not talking to you the same”
The teachers in fact, felt that they needed to try to protect the children from the test by conducting it later into the term and adapting it for them. They felt that the test was something which was harmful to the children.
Children and teachers however, did demonstrate some resistance to the test. Children resisted through their body language, through demonstrating their feelings through their bodies when they were unable to communicate this verbally. They moved away from the teacher, leaned away from the teacher and refused to look her in the eye. One child even refused a “high five”, leaving the teacher’s hand “hanging” when she congratulated him for finishing the test.
Another form of resistance demonstrated by one child was the use of play. Throughout the test, this child continually turned the conversation to her own play focus, talking about her life and the things she was interested in. She then used the resources provided for the test to play with, pretending that the counting manipulatives were a class of children and organising the shapes for pattern making into a “Mickey mouse dog”. This child was not prepared to play the game of the test and successfully sabotaged the test to make it into a play situation. The teacher colluded with her in this sabotage, allowing her to play with the resources and listening to her conversation intently. This finding was aligned with Roberts-Holmes et al (2024) who also found that teachers and children demonstrated small acts of micro resistance.
Evaluating these findings from a doppelgänger as method (Pierlejewski, 2024) perspective involves asking where a doppelgänger or double has been produced and how this functions. The doppelgänger here is clearly a data doppelgänger. The whole purpose of the test is to extract data from the children to create a data doppelgänger. This will then be compared to the data doppelgänger of the child at age 11. The process of extraction here is painful. It is as if the doppelgänger is being wrenched out of the child and the child feels it in a visceral way.
To conduct this painful operation on the youngest children in the school is wholly inappropriate. It sacrifices their right to early years education and play (Convention on the rights of the child, 1989) for a process of data extraction . This was powerfully expressed by one if the teachers who said:
“I can’t believe that we are making a judgment of how this child is going to achieve in however many years time on a 20 minute test when they just started school within six weeks of four…I think its pretty shameful to be honest”
Ignoring a child’s right to play and masquerading under a facade of pedagogical necessity, we suggest that RBA successfully transforms the Reception class into a site of data capture and extraction. Our small-scale research suggests that digital RBA has a tendency to steer the first few weeks of Reception class (and primary school) away from communal processes of socialisation grounded in physical activities such as play and towards the construction of digitally disciplined subjects for algorithmic surveillance and data extraction. Within this RBA (and primary school) operates as a site of predatory data extraction initiating children into economies of data and platform labour (Couldry and Mejias, 2019). RBA is thus the state’s expansion of new data extraction and data colonisation processes into early years territory
Researchers: Dr Mandy Pierlejewski and Jennifer Holly (Leeds Beckett Univeristy). Professor Guy Roberts-Holmes and Dr Sara Hawley (IoE, Univeristy College London)
References
Convention on the rights of the child (1989) Treaty no. 27531. United Nations Treaty Series, 1577, pp. 3-178. [Online] Available at: https://treaties.un.org/doc/Treaties/1990/09/19900902%2003-14%20AM/Ch_IV_11p.pdf [accessed May 5, 2025]
Couldry, N. and Mejias, U. (2019) The Costs of Connection: How Data Is Colonizing Human Life and Appropriating It for Capitalism Stanford University Press
Pierlejewski, M. (2024) Doppelganger as method: a framework for examining datafication. Contemporary Issues in Early Childhood. DOI 10.1177/14639491241273927
Roberts-Holmes, G., Sousa, D. and Lee, S. F. (2024) Reception Baseline Assessment and ‘Small Acts’ of Micro-Resistance. British Educational Research Journal, pp. 1–12.
Standards and testing agency (2024) 2024 reception baseline assessment:assessment and reporting arrangements. [Online] Available at: https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2024-reception-baseline-assessment-assessment-and-reporting-arrangements-ara/2024-reception-baseline-assessment-assessment-and-reporting-arrangements [accessed May 5, 2025]
Altered States of Academia 
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