Supplier appointed for digital Reception Baseline Assessment delivery
The Department for Education has confirmed Made Tech will support the transformation of early years pupil testing.
Introduced in 2021, the Reception Baseline Assessment [RBA] measures the communication, language, literacy and maths skills of children as they enter the school system.
A new digital assessment is set to be introduced in September 2025, with the Department for Education [DfE] acting on behalf of its executive, Standards and Testing Agency, to begin a four year contract with Made Tech. The digital transformation specialist focuses on public sector projects.
The firm will be asked to ‘deliver and build the digital assessment platforms, including the underlying data platforms’ for the RBA, with work now starting to set a minimum viable product. This stage will complete in spring next year, six months ahead of intended rollout across the school system.
Moving forward, the first year of the contract will require Made Tech to ensure the system is scalable, robust and secure, meaning Standard and Testing Agency can use it across the entire primary network and ensure standards are consistent. Management and maintenance is also included in the brief from 2025 onward, although training, guidance and impact assessment are not.
Currently, the contract is valued at £16.5million, but with an option to extend by 12 months, which would bring overall spend to just under £20million, including VAT. However, when complete investment is taken into account the figure is much higher, as other suppliers have been engaged in RBA digitisation since 2018.
A beta tool has already been trialled by a few hundred institutions, representing around 3% of the UK primary school estate. Once fully launched, the digital RBA will be the first in a suite of new cloud-based services introduced by suppliers on behalf of the DfE, intended to modernise early years education.
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