Assessing Primary Writing 2021–22: Year 1 results

Daisy Christodoulou
The No More Marking Blog
5 min readFeb 4, 2022

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Sign up for our webinar on Monday 14th February at 4pm to hear Daisy talk about these results.

Over the last few weeks, 1,127 primary schools have taken part in our Year 1 writing moderation task. In total, 12,890 teachers from these schools judged the writing of 43,720 year 1 pupils. The overall reliability of the judging was 0.9, which shows a high level of consistency between teachers.

The task

The task is in the figure below. Pupils completed the task in controlled conditions to ensure the writing was independent.

This is the fourth year we have set a specific task. Previously, schools chose their own task. We have explained the reason for the change in a previous blog: put simply, our schools wanted us to set a specific task as it is harder to judge when everyone is doing something different! Because the work has been completed in independent conditions, it is not directly comparable with work completed in more structured conditions. You may find that work that doesn’t ‘look’ that impressive is getting a high score, but please remember that pupils have responded in independent conditions to the stimulus so some errors are to be expected!

The results

As the judging was completed to a high degree of reliability, we can see the scaled scores of all 43,720 pupils on the same measurement scale, shown below. The measurement scale runs from approximately 300–700 and is consistent across all of our assessments at primary and KS3.

With the measurement scale in place, we can estimate for every pupil their writing age and an indication of whether they are at the Expected Standard or Greater Depth Standard for their year group.

WTS / EXS / GDS indicator

We have written before (extensively!) about the limitations of the WTS / EXS / GDS scale, and we think that the scaled score and writing age both provide you with more nuanced information about pupil performance. However, we also know that schools are keen to have at least some idea of where these national thresholds might sit, so we have provided a statistical indicator as to where these grades are. We do this in the following way.

First, we check to see how representative our sample of schools is. We do this by looking at the overall profile of all our participating schools who also have national Year 6 Sats results in 2019. We found from this comparison that our sample of schools are representative. The schools averaged 104 in their KS2 reading results compared with 104 nationally. 73% of pupils in these schools achieved EXS+ in reading, compared with 72% nationally, and 26% achieved a reading high score, compared with 27% nationally. We therefore have a large and nationally representative sample of schools, not skewed towards high or low attainment in any way.

Now we know we have a nationally representative sample, we can apply grades to it using national statistics, in the following way. We know that in 2019, in year 2, 15% of pupils achieved greater depth nationally in writing, and 69% EXS+. Given that we have a nationally representative group of schools, we can draw lines on our distribution at the 15% and 69% mark, as you can see below.

We can then identify the scaled score point that these thresholds correspond to and use these as the grade boundaries. For this year, they are as follows EXS = 369; GDS = 466.

Perhaps the most important thing to realise about these grades is that they do not represent end-of-year expectations. If a pupil gets a GDS on this assessment, it means that their piece of work has come in the top 15% of a large, nationally representative sample of January Y1 writing. We would expect the same pupils to produce higher quality work in June / July, and for the boundaries to increase accordingly.

Writing age

We know from our previous work that there is a relationship between age and writing score. For example, we are able to say that the average scaled score achieved by pupils aged 7 years and 2 months is 471. We can therefore say that a scaled score of 471 is equivalent to a ‘writing age’ of 7 years and 2 months. We can then extrapolate from this relationship to provide a writing age equivalent for every scaled score on our scale. So, pupils achieving a scaled score of 452 have a writing age of 6 years and 9 months; pupils with a scaled score of 520 have a writing age of 9 years and 0 months.

Over the last four years, we have assessed over half a million pieces of writing from children aged 5y6m to 14y1m, and our writing age is based on this data. It is therefore capped at 5y6m at the bottom, and 14y1m at the top.

We would also point out that there is always more uncertainty about scores at the very top and very bottom of our scale — as indeed is the case with most assessments. If you are concerned about a very high or very low score, we’d suggest looking at the confidence intervals associated with that score. You can find these on the final page of the PDF report and in the Excel spreadsheet.

More to follow

We will follow up shortly with examples of pupils’ writing from this window. We have a webinar on Monday 14th February at 4pm where we will discuss the results in this blog and the information provided in the individual school pdfs in more detail. If you have questions about anything here, we really recommend signing up for that webinar, or watching it afterwards.

This blog has summarised the Year 1 Assessing Primary Writing results, and the Year 4 results will be out next week. The Year 2 & Year 6 assessments are about to start, and there is still (just) time to take part in them by signing up here.

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