Improving Secondary Writing tasks

The task to be used for Improving Secondary Writing in 2023-24

Assessing Secondary Writing consists of:

2 assessment windows per year, one at the start and one at the end, for each of Years 7-9. These are non-fiction tasks, and we design them.
2 assessment windows per year, one in November and one in February/March, for each of Years 10-11. These are AQA Eng Lang past paper questions.

You can choose which year groups you want to take part. You can enter just one or two of the assessments, most of them, or all of them!

For KS3 we will release the task stimuli at the beginning of the week in which the writing window starts (go to the task and the Download national assessment documents link to access them). For KS4 you will need to access the AQA archive.

To see the release and upload dates, as well as the Year 10/11 task details, check the calendar here. We will also email you when the tasks are available.

Tasks and timing

The tasks involve a specific piece of writing where we provide the stimulus that will prompt the students to write.

The task should be completed in no more than one hour.

Conditions

When you judge the task, 80% of the judgements you do will involve comparisons of your students. The other 20% will involve comparisons of writing from students from other schools.* This means that in order for the comparisons to be fair, students in different schools have to complete the work under the same conditions.

Therefore, please ensure students 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 students any extra resources. The reason we have introduced these independent conditions is to ensure fairness and consistency between schools. Improving Secondary Writing is not a high-stakes assessment. Adhering to these conditions will give you the most accurate and helpful information possible.