Five ways you can make the primary writing moderation process less stressful

The primary interim frameworks are now in their second year, and their inconsistencies have been well-documented. Education Datalab have shown that last year there were inconsistencies between local authorities, while more recently the TES published an article revealing that many writing moderators were unable to correctly assess specimen portfolios. Here are five ways to help deal with the uncertainty.

1. Look outside your school or network
Teachers are great judges of their pupils’ work, but find it much harder to place those judgements on a national scale. So wherever possible, try to get exposure to work outside your school to get a clearer idea of where the national standard is.

2. Use what we know about results last year
The interim frameworks were used for the first time last year and, as noted, there are plenty of inconsistencies in how they were applied. However, we do now know that last year, nationally, 74% of pupils were awarded EXS+, and 15% GDS. This compares to 66% and 19% respectively in reading.

3. Check your greater depth (especially if you’re a school in a disadvantaged area)
There is particular evidence that greater depth is being applied inconsistently, and that schools with below average attainment overall are reluctant to award greater depth.

4. Remember that all achievement is on a continuum
Like all grades, ‘greater depth’ and ‘expected standard’ are just arbitrary lines. A pupil who just scrapes ‘expected standard’ actually has more in common with a pupil at the top of ‘working towards’ than they do with a pupil at the top of ‘expected standard’. Not everyone in the same grade will have exactly the same profile, and sometimes the differences between pupils getting the same grade will be greater than pupils with different grades.

5. Use the Sharing Standards results
In March, 199 schools and 8512 pupils took part in Sharing Standards: a trial using comparative judgement to assess Year 6 writing. The results are available here, together with exemplar portfolios. The results offer all four of the benefits above: they involve teacher judgement from across the country; they use information from last year’s results to set this year’s standard; this means they avoid the problem of school-level bias; and they allow you to see the distribution of scripts, not just the grade.

Some people have expressed surprise at the quality of the work at the greater depth threshold. But as we’ve seen, there is no national agreement about what greater depth is.  It is true that the comparative judgement process does not use the interim frameworks, but it does have the same intention: to support professionals in assessing writing quality. In our follow-up survey with schools, 98% of the respondents said they are planning to use their results in their moderation process as they felt the results supported their internal assessment of writing standards. The Sharing Standards results are the only nationally standardised scale of Key Stage 2 writing, so it can’t hurt to take a look and see how thousands of pupils nationally are doing.