Identifying a child who needs extra help can be useful. Identifying them as someone likely to fail is a much more dangerous exercise. The distinction matters when schools are asked to predict future unemployment from an early age.
A forecast can influence the treatment that follows it. Teachers may lower expectations, a family may become discouraged, or the child may begin to understand the label as a description of who they are. Those risks don't mean all assessment is harmful. They mean the purpose and use of the assessment need care.
What selection taught us
The history of the eleven-plus offers a warning, rather than an exact equivalent. It helped determine which education a child would receive, and the distinction between allocation and passing or failing became socially powerful.
A test result at eleven doesn't capture everything a person can become. Family circumstances and preparation affect performance, and children's development doesn't follow a single timetable. That doesn't establish that every grammar-school pupil was selected by class or that academic assessment has no value.
It does challenge confidence that an early judgement can identify a child's proper future.
What follows the label?
Schools often already know which children face difficulties. Knowing more can help, but the information matters only if it leads to support that is available and effective.
What intervention will follow? Who will see the assessment? Can it be revisited? Will it open opportunities or restrict them? A child shouldn't carry an adverse prediction through school as though it were a settled fact.
The aim of preventing later exclusion from work is worth taking seriously. It requires education, support and real opportunities, rather than simply a better register of children expected to struggle.
I want early help to expand what a child can do. We should be wary of any system in which a prediction about their future becomes a reason to offer them less.