Jan Dubiel is an accidental revolutionary.

He is the 50-year-old former Reception teacher behind one of the most successful primary assessments ever introduced - a government-approved plan that still managed to catch the government unawares, and forced it to reconsider how we treat the youngest children in our schools.

When, five years ago, ministers proposed assessing four-year-olds when they first arrived in Reception, there was widespread opposition to - and even threats to boycott - the planned new baseline assessment. But when the scheme did go ahead and schools were offered EExBA, the baseline assessment devised by Dubiel - the national director of training organisation Early Excellence - they found something they liked.

Primaries could have gone for two other baseline assessment options based around tasks or tests, but 80 per cent of them - 12,000 schools - went for Dubiel’s creation, based on teacher observation. Its success was down to one overriding factor - he understands Reception teachers. To outsiders, EExBA, which relies on teachers recording their observations of children against 47 assessment statements, sounds like a workload-inducing headache. But to thousands of early years teachers, it sounds like Dubiel is talking their language.

And it is more than understanding - it is about respect. Something Dubiel feels is lacking in many discussions on early years.

“There are quite a lot of critiques of early years practice from secondary school teachers,” he says. “When I challenge it on social media, I say, ‘Look, if we’re doing it all wrong, then please take Reception for a year and show us how to do it.’ They never do.”

But he is a man who has done it, who has worked in early years with the scooters, the train sets and the swirling pictures of sunshine. He is, he admits, unusual.

“On my first day of my PGCE, they asked the people who were doing early years to go to a special meeting at 4pm,” Dubiel remembers.

“I walked into that early years meeting and it was all women and me. And one tutor came in and rushed up to the other tutor and whispered, ‘There’s a man in here!’ They were both really excited. That is when I realised that being a man in early years made me somewhat of an oddity. It hadn’t occurred to me at any point until then.”

Dubiel was born and brought up in East London. His father, Stanislaw, was a Polish refugee who escaped to Britain and took part in the D-Day landings. After the war, he settled in London and became a GP. Dubiel’s Danish mother, Ellen, was a sculptor.

He read peace studies at the University of Bradford (“It involved looking at conflicts in different disciplines and how they could be resolved, whether they were conflicts in society, between economic models or politics”) and did some voluntary work in a primary school - which was when he realised teaching Reception was “absolutely what I wanted to do”.

His career progressed from teacher to early years consultant, as he moved from Bradford to Oxford, Norfolk and York.

But it was when he became the senior early years adviser at the London Borough of Havering in 2003 that he realised the importance of championing early years teachers. “It was my introduction to how education is all frameworked within a political, strategic view,” he explains, “and to the need to argue the case for early years in that wider strategy.”

That political nous was to prove invaluable in his next job, heading up the foundation stage profile at the National Assessment Agency, later to become the Qualifications and Curriculum Development Agency (QCDA).

Vocal opposition

The profile, which originally included 117 individual judgements on each child to be made at the end of Reception year, was described as “ludicrous” by the late Ted Wragg, the highly respected emeritus professor of education at the University of Exeter, who emailed Dubiel about it. The vocal opposition to the workload involved prompted repeated tweaks and reviews, but the principles behind it were welcomed in Reception classrooms.

In 2010, the coalition government was formed and the politics changed. And so when Dubiel was offered the chance to work with Huddersfield-based Early Excellence, he took it. By then, Dubiel’s two children with his wife, Vivienne, a key stage 1 teacher, were at school. He also has a daughter from a previous relationship. So rather than uprooting the family from Essex, it was agreed that he would create a southern centre for the company.

Then came the proposal for a baseline assessment and, given his experience with the profile, Dubiel’s role changed to creating EExBA and training teachers on using it. It meant he had to take plenty of flak.

The government wanted baseline assessments, and so funded schools to use them. But the idea of that public money going to a private company that created the most popular assessment caused outrage on social media.

“None of us have yachts or helicopters,” Dubiel says, talking of the abuse he received on Twitter from people accusing him of being in it for the money.

“We’re basically a group of ex-teachers who want to do their best to support early years practice. We’re not in it to make money; the money enables us to do the things we want to do,” he explains.

Dubiel is an informal kind of person; he gestures expansively as he talks. He is fond of the odd swear word and occasionally launches into rants. But when it comes to early years, he is extremely serious.

Working in early years is not a simpler, noisier version of working in primary, he argues. It is unique, which is why early years assessment needs to be different. The enthusiasm for EExBA prompted the last government to talk of making the KS1 tests more rigorous, to counter what was seen as a less rigorous baseline. But then the three approved assessments were found to be incompatible and the baseline assessment was abandoned. The government has recently been consulting on whether to try again.

These new proposals have been condemned by the NUT and ATL teaching unions, but cautiously supported by the NAHT heads’ union, which points out that its members do not envisage a “formal test”.

Dubiel remains in the middle of the storm - people who oppose any formal baseline assessments argue with him. But he is also opposed by those who say an observation-based assessment is not formal enough.

So perhaps his decision to take that degree in resolving conflicts was prescient. Dubiel says he draws strength from his experiences: “I go into schools and early years settings a lot and the energy, dynamism and commitment shown by early years practitioners is incredible. Whatever happens, strategically, I think you can always rely on them to do their best thing for those children. I am always optimistic.”