Measuring primary writing: part one, 2018–19

This is a three part blog series that explains how you can compare our primary scores from 2018–19, 2019–20 and 2020–21. This is part one, and deals with 2018–19.

In 2018–19, we introduced set tasks and conditions to our Assessing Primary Writing project. One of the reasons we did this is to make it possible to compare any task with any other task, as long as they have both been completed in the same ‘cold’ conditions. This is really important, because by comparing different tasks we can see if pupils are making progress or not.

We ran six different national assessment windows that year, one for each year group. After each judging window was complete, we linked it to all the ones that had gone before. We did this by taking a sample of writing from all the year groups that had been completed at that point, and judging them together. This allowed us to see how each year group related to each other, and we could apply those findings back to all of the pieces of writing. The result was the following graph (you can read more about it in the blog from May 2019 here).

This shows pretty much what you would expect — pupils in the older year groups have higher average writing scores than those in lower year groups! It’s also interesting to note that there is a range of scores in every year group, which means that some top performing year 4s, for example, are doing better than many year 6s.

The next blog will explain how we used this scale in our second year of assessments, in 2019–20

Learn more about Assessing Primary Writing.