Reception baseline assessment: collection page
Information about the reception baseline assessment (RBA) for schools.
The RBA became statutory in schools in September 2021. It is an activity-based assessment of pupils’ starting points in:
- language, communication and literacy
- mathematics
The RBA is a short, task-based assessment. It is not used to label or track individual pupils.
Schools are required to carry out the assessment within the first 6 weeks of pupils starting reception. No numerical score is shared and the data will only be used at the end of year 6 to form the school-level progress measure. However, teachers will receive a series of short, narrative statements that tell them how their pupils performed in the assessment. These can be used to inform teaching within the first term.
The assessment will enable us to create school-level progress measures for primary schools which show the progress pupils make from reception until the end of key stage 2 (KS2).
We will publish these measures for all-through primaries in the summer of 2028 for the first time. This will be when those pupils who entered reception in the academic year 2021 to 2022 reach the end of KS2.
Information for the academic years 2025 to 2026 onwards
From September 2025, schools will need to use our new assessment services via DfE Sign-in to administer the RBA. Schools will also need 2 devices to administer it – one will be used by the teacher to administer the assessment and the pupil will need to use a separate touchscreen device to respond to some of the questions.
The assessment will remain interactive and retain the use of physical resources for other questions. This change supports accessibility and aligns with developments in classroom practice.
Information for the RBA in the academic year 2024 to 2025
The Standards and Testing Agency (STA) contracted the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) to develop and deliver the RBA. This includes the academic year 2024 to 2025. You can find the relevant information and guidance for this below.
NFER’s privacy notices explain what personal data is collected and how this is processed.
If you have any questions about the RBA in the academic year 2024 to 2025 which is not covered in the guidance below, please contact the reception baseline assessment helpline on 0330 088 4171 or email [email protected].
Updates to this page
Published 27 February 2019Last updated 13 December 2024 + show all updates
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Removed guidance for participating in the 'try it out' activity for the 2025 RBA, which ended on Friday 13 December 2024.
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Added guidance on how to try out the 2025 assessment services for the reception baseline assessment.
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Updated to include the '2024 reception baseline assessment: assessment and reporting arrangements'.
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STA previously announced changes to the RBA from September 2024, but this has been delayed by a year, until September 2025 - the latest updates to this guidance reflect this.
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Updated for the academic year 2023 to 2024
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Updated to reflect that the RBA is now established and providing collections for multiple academic years
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Changes have been made to move current information from across two separate pages (guidance and collection page) to one page (this collection page).
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Added 'Reception baseline assessment: quality monitoring visit guidance' to the Reception baseline information collection.
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Added 'Reception baseline assessment: information for parents' and 'Reception baseline assessment validity report'.
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Added 'Reception baseline assessment: equality impact assessment' and 'Reception baseline assessment: assessment and reporting arrangements (ARA)'.
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Updated to note any reference to the reception baseline assessment becoming statutory from 2020 in these documents is now inaccurate. Statutory introduction of the reception baseline assessment has been postponed to autumn 2021.
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First published.