Research shows that assessing children’s writing is one of the hardest and most time-consuming tasks a teacher faces. Comparative Judgement is a completely different way of assessing writing that is far more accurate and much quicker too. There are six national windows every year, one per year group. Here’s how it works.

 

Before writing week

You upload your pupil data to our site and download special pre-prepared lined sheets of paper with a unique pupil code at the bottom.

Writing week

You receive an engaging writing task designed by a leading children’s illustrator. You give pupils one hour to write their answers on their answer sheets under strictly controlled conditions to ensure standardised conditions between schools. After finishing you batch scan and upload the scans to our website where we check them.

Judging week

You gather your teachers together for an hour where they judge individually, online, pairs of writing side by side, deciding each time on the better writing. There are no criteria, just professional judgement! To ensure everyone gets a fair score, every fifth judgement a teacher will see a pair of scripts from two other schools. A teacher is never asked to judge a pupil from their own school against a pupil from another school, so the comparison is always fair. These moderation judgements allow for the silent and efficient scaling of scores done by a powerful statistical model running in the background.

Results week

Within a week you will receive detailed reports on the writing ability of your pupils in the context of other schools. Last year, every national writing window attracted over 700 schools and over 30,000 individual writing submissions so we are in the unique position to offer not only scaled scores but writing ages and nationally standardised grades (WTS, EXS and GDS). The reports are accompanied by booklets of exemplar scripts along with a fully searchable archive of scripts matched to year group, scaled score, writing age and national percentile.

Taking part in Assessing Primary Writing will help you develop a whole school approach to writing that is based on good evidence and a firm grasp of the national picture. Over the summer we have ensured that pupils can submit work from home on any mobile device without the need to print or scan so you can be sure we are ready for remote learning should it need to continue.

The next writing window is Year 3 in October 2020. For a limited time, primary schools can join this national window entirely FREE. Click here for more details and to sign up.