Year 4 writing 2023–24: what have we learned?

We’ve just published the results of our latest Year 4 primary writing assessment. For the first time we asked Year 4 pupils to write a story rather than a persuasive piece of writing.

• The Year 4s are showing good stable progress

We have a sample of 12,155 pupils who have taken the written assessments every year since year 1. After a large increase between years 1 and 2 the progress has been fairly linear.

Progress in writing for pupils taking year on year writing assessments

The disadvantage index

The disadvantage index shows that the change from persuasive writing to narrative has had no impact on the relative performance of pupil premium and non pupil premium groups in Year 4. 332 schools have taken the year 4 assessment for the last 4 years, over which time the index has shown very little fluctuation.