When do pupils make progress at primary?

Before Easter, we completed our final Assessing Primary Writing judging window of the year, meaning that in total this year we have assessed the work of 146,135 primary pupils from schools in England and around the world. You can read about each year group’s results in more detail here. Now we have the results for each primary year group, we can show you how pupils perform in different year groups, using the following graph.

Here are some interesting insights from this data.

Writing improves over time. This is fairly obvious — pupils do better in each primary year group!

Pupils make more progress in the early years. This graph also makes it easy to see some other very interesting patterns. On average, there is most progress between years 1 & 2. Progress between years 2 & 3 is much smaller. This can be partly explained by the fact that the year 3 assessment is much earlier in the year than year 2, but it is still not as big a gap as you might expect. Average improvements from 4–6 are all quite small and steady.

There are significant overlaps between year groups. Again, I think we all know this is the case, but it’s perhaps bigger than you might expect. For example, you can see on this chart that a big chunk of high performing year 4 pupils are doing better than the average score in year 6. Likewise a section of year 6 pupils are below the average for year 3.

Gaps narrow over time. Another striking insight from this graph is the narrowing of the distribution across the year groups. There is a really wide range of achievement in year 1, which consistently narrows all the way to year 6. We saw this pattern in last year’s data too, and noted then that this is a little bit unusual — there are other data sets for other subjects which show the opposite pattern, of gaps widening over time. Why is this? You could attribute it to good teaching, spreading the understanding of good writing to all pupils equally. Perhaps it has something to do with the nature of writing too — perhaps it is easier for pupils to converge on a standard in writing than in a subject like maths, say.

What about the patterns in individual schools? This week, we have sent out reports to all our schools which provide schools with a similar chart but just for their own pupils. These graphs look like this.

Each dot represents one pupil, and the colour represent the national grades. This school’s data has a similar pattern to the national data, but they can pick out some interesting patterns — for example, they have a particularly wide range in year 4, where one pupil has one of the highest scores in the entire school, but a handful are below the year 1 average.

There is plenty more information in the end of year report — we hope subscribers find it useful, and you can contact us if you have any feedback.

You can find out more about Assessing Primary Writing, including how to subscribe, here.