Assessing Primary Writing consists of six national judging windows per year, one for each primary year group.
We will release the task for each window the Monday before the writing week starts (go to the task and the Download national assessment documents link to access them). To see the release and upload dates, check the calendar here. We will also email you as soon as the task is available.
Tasks and timing
The tasks will consist of an image or text stimulus that will prompt the pupils to write. All the tasks should be completed in no more than one hour. The tasks will be either fiction or non-fiction, as follows.
Year 1: fiction, image prompt (2-page task)
Year 2: fiction, image prompt (2-page task)
Year 3: fiction, image prompt (2-page task)
Year 4: non-fiction, image and text prompt (2-page task)
Year 5: non-fiction, image and text prompt (2-page task)
Year 6: fiction, image prompt (2-page task)
Example task from Assessing Primary Writing 2018-19
Conditions
When you judge these tasks, 80% * of the judgements you do will involve comparisons of your pupils. The other 20% will involve comparisons of scripts from other schools. This means that in order for the comparisons to be fair, pupils in different schools have to complete the work under the same conditions.
Therefore, please ensure pupils complete the work in independent conditions with no use of sentence starters, success criteria, exercise books or other external aids.
The task will be available for download as a PDF document. Display the PDF at the front of the class and/or print off copies of the PDF to give to each pupil.
Each task will also come with a PDF document with specific teacher instructions for that task. Please do not edit the tasks in any way or give pupils any extra resources. The reason we have introduced these independent conditions is to ensure fairness and consistency between schools. Assessing Primary Writing is not a high-stakes assessment. Adhering to these conditions will give you the most accurate and helpful information possible.