The Assessment System That Is Failing One Million Children — and the Cambridge Researchers Who Found a Way to Fix It

Imagine a five-year-old sitting across from a receptionist in a Bradford, Leicester, or Tower Hamlets elementary school. The child has been in an English nursery for less than a year, has spoken Panjabi, Somali, or Sylheti at home since birth, and is currently being evaluated on their language and communication abilities using a standardized tool created for and tested on monolingual English children. The youngster performs worse than their classmates. The gap is noted by the instructor. Why is the most important and challenging question to answer.

This question is central to a 2020 policy paper by Kamila Polěenská, Shula Chiat, James Fenton, and Penny Roy that was published in the University of Cambridge’s Languages, Society & Policy journal. The Early Years Foundation Stage framework in the UK presents practitioners working with the approximately one million children in English primary schools who speak one or more of the more than 300 languages at home with three distinct challenges. It is worthwhile to sit with the number. 300 languages. According to the EYFS framework, practitioners should work with parents or caregivers to assess a child’s proficiency in their native tongue if the child does not have a strong command of English. When neither the instructor nor any available interpreter speak Tigrinya or Twi, it doesn’t explain how this is supposed to occur.

The distinction between two completely different circumstances that can result in identical test scores is the crucial issue, which the paper contends has grave implications for children’s long-term outcomes. A child who performs poorly on an English language test may be doing so because they haven’t had enough exposure to the language, a gap that will eventually close with time and education. Alternatively, they may be acting in this way due to an underlying language disorder, which affects about 10% of children regardless of language background and necessitates specialist intervention instead of patient waiting. On a typical assessment, these two kids have the same appearance. They require entirely different answers. Additionally, the researchers point out that children with untreated language disorders are quantifiably less likely to pursue higher education or work as adults. Early detection is not a formality. It has actual repercussions that can be measured in decades.

The paper’s most important contribution is its defense of assessment instruments that measure a child’s learning process rather than what they already know. The Crosslinguistic Nonword Repetition test avoids the English morpheme patterns that render most existing tests inappropriate for multilingual children by asking children to repeat made-up words composed of consonants and vowels that are common in many languages. It was developed within a framework intended to minimize language-specific features. Test results for children between the ages of four and seven showed a strong distinction between children with identified language impairment and those who were developing normally, but they were unaffected by the children’s language background. Clinically significant data was obtained from a five-minute task that was presented as a game on a laptop with child headphones. In early childhood assessments, that combination is less common than it ought to be.

The second tool in the paper is the Early Sociocognitive Battery, which evaluates the nonverbal sociocognitive abilities that support language acquisition. The foundational skills for comprehending the meaning of words and the reasons behind their use are social responsiveness, joint attention, and symbolic comprehension. These skills can be evaluated using very little language, making them truly applicable in a variety of linguistic and cultural contexts. According to research, this battery is a reliable indicator of social communication issues and possible ASD, but it is unaffected by ethnicity or language background. It’s difficult to overlook the elegance of evaluating a child’s potential rather than their prior knowledge in a language they haven’t had much time to learn.

With great caution, the paper exposes a structural flaw in a framework that explicitly states that equality of opportunity must be guaranteed and that no child should be left behind. In the words of the framework itself. The question of whether the current assessment procedures provide them is a completely different one that calls for more than just updated guidelines to address.