We’ve just sent out the results of our September 2020 Year 7 writing assessment to school. Key findings: Year 7s are 22 months behind where we’d expect them to be at this time in the year.

Over 112,000 pupils from 644 schools in England took part in this assessment. They scored an average of 533 on our universal writing scale. We’d expect them to score about 557. In March of Year 6, earlier this year, the same cohort averaged 550 on one of our assessments.

In fact, the score of 533 is about the same as that achieved in our most recent Year 5 assessment from November 2019. Here’s an example of a piece of writing with the mean Year 7 score of 533.

And here is an example of a piece of writing with a score of 557, which is what we’d expect the mean to be.

The task we set the Year 7s was exactly the same as the one we set those Year 5s, so you can directly compare the performance of the two year groups.

We can’t definitely say this is because of COVID-19, as we don’t have historic data on Sept Y7. It could be that Y7s always fall back this far in Sept, due to summer holidays & school transfer. The existing literature suggests these have some impact – but nothing like 22 months!

We also don’t know if this fall will be seen in other subjects. Writing clearly has overlaps with reading, but students probably get more chances to practise reading outside school. So school disruption may have a greater impact on writing attainment than reading attainment.

We’ll be following up with a summer assessment of these same Year 7s to see if they can make up ground, and also will shortly have similar data for primary year groups (where we do have historic data and so will be able to give you a better idea of the impact of COVID-19).

Further reading

Short blog summary https://bit.ly/3kHguuV 
Full report https://bit.ly/3jlM3Jk 
How we create scaled scores, grades & writing ages https://bit.ly/32dcFXx 
Examples of writing at different scores https://bit.ly/3oQctqO 

If you would like to find out even more, we have two webinars next week which will explain the results in more detail.

One for participants on Tues 3rd Nov at 4pm https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_oPpXpPweTruE4O1FC0kaDQ

One for non-participants on Thurs 5th Nov at 4pm
https://us02web.zoom.us/webinar/register/WN_aXYXaIXtQFG09G-lc2Ogkw