Teacher's Moderation Toolkit

The Teacher's Moderation Toolkit can be used to standardise and benchmark children's writing at three termly intervals, as a CPD resource to support teachers working together to make judgements and also as a classroom resource to share the expected standards of writing with children. Currently, writing is teacher assessed at both Key Stage 1 and Key Stage 2. Teachers are expected to assess a collection of children's writing that illustrate writing for different purposes and in different forms; for example, a child may write a persuasive letter, an informative leaflet, a story with a flashback, a narrative poem and a survival guide linked to their creative curriculum.Assessing a collection of writing requires teachers to be able to identify features in the child's writing, answering the questions:What can this writer do?What features have they included?Do they meet the expected standard for their year group?Are they on track to be the expected standard by the end of the year?What features are missing from their writing?What are their next steps?Many schools have worked together to create writing portfolios of what is the expected standard for each year group. As a teaching school alliance, we recognised that teachers would benefit from a moderated, standardised toolkit that could both assist and guide teachers when making termly judgements about children's writing.Initially, we worked with English subject leaders spanning a range of local authorities in the north-west of England. Schools were given a set of writing tasks to complete with years 1-6 so that it would be easier to make comparisons when moderating the writing.The first task was a picture prompt of a girl called Lizzie in a silver birch tree (See Appendix A)and children were asked to write a description. The following term, schools were given a choice of writing prompts related to other pictures of Lizzie - a newspaper report, a narrative and a diary.As schools collated evidence of children writing at different points in the year, we decided to offer specific year group moderating sessions where teachers brought samples of children's writing and annotated them in groups (some of these samples feature as part of the resource). At this point teachers did not use any criteria to moderate with. Instead they focused on the question'What can this writer do?'...