Year 6 writing 2023–24: what have we learned?

We’ve just published the results of our latest Year 6 primary writing assessment. Here are some insights.

• The Year 6s are at about where we’d expect.

We have assessed the writing of Year 6s for five years now. Here’s a table with the data for the schools who have taken part in all of these assessments. They are still a few scaled score points behind where they were in 2020, but it’s not a huge difference.

Year 6 data for our common centres

The attainment gap continues to widen

Every year the distribution of the scores has continued to widen, suggesting more inequality of achievement within the cohort.

The disadvantage index

The disadvantage index for the common centres has returned to pre-pandemic levels.

Our findings differ from the national writing moderation results. You can read a longer discussion of the differences here. You can also find out how we set the GDS and EXS grades on our assessments here.