Introduction:
Cambridge’s Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring launched their Check Together product in 2023. This online assessment of Early Years skills is used with learners in schools around the world to assess their early reading and mathematics skills on entry to formal schooling. The assessment is carried out by teachers in five countries, in English, in schools that use English for the primary means of educational communication.
The early reading module of the assessment covers letter recognition (requiring students to identify letters presented on screen verbally), word recognition (requiring students to point to one of five words presented on screen that they hear) and vocabulary (requiring students to point to items in an on-screen picture that they believe match the word they hear), providing teachers with insight into learner starting points for literacy education.

Method:
Children starting in EY2 aged 4-5 in schools in Cyprus, Indonesia, India, Thailand and Vietnam were assessed using Cambridge Early Years Check Together: a computer-based adaptive assessment.
Data from the assessments of 1010 students in 33 schools across the 5 countries were analysed. We used Rasch analysis to calculate difficulty values for each item in the assessment and further analysis was carried out to determine the percentage of children able to answer each question correctly. The results were then broken down by country to form a comparison.

Findings:
It is clear from the data that there are broad similarities between children in different countries regarding English letter recognition. Across all countries in the study there is some common understanding of the early phonics sounds advocated by the UK curriculum, but the ability of children to recognise them in assessment conditions at this early stage is varied and when examined by country, there appears to be differences in 'school academic readiness' which is perhaps cultural.
However, confidence levels with individual letters did not always correlate with word recognition assessment scores. Indeed, in some cases, learners who were very confident in letter recognition were not in word recognition, and vice versa.
Interestingly, when reviewing the data for the vocabulary section of the test, we found 75% of all learners in the study were confident in 11 of the 12 words tested, despite lower confidence scores in the letter and word recognition parts of the assessment.

Conclusion:
What is noted by the analysis is that when formal schooling in English begins, an understanding of the early English phonic sounds seems apparent in most countries to some degree, but the readiness of children for formal schooling differs widely between countries.
Knowing what children know and can do is vital to effective lesson planning in the Early Years. Using an assessment such as Cambridge Early Years Check Together at the start of the new school year can provide real insights into the knowledge and understanding of young children that could otherwise take weeks or months to discover in a typical classroom setting. Providing a safe space for children to answer questions in a one-to-one setting with their teacher can reveal significant levels of ability from which to begin formal instruction.

Keywords: Early Reading, Assessment, International education.