Improving Secondary Writing Guide, 2025-26

• This help guide is for subscribers to Improving Secondary Writing (ISW).
• It will help you get the most out of your No More Marking Improving Secondary Writing subscription in 2025-26.
• It's organised into five parts: (1) Comparative Judgement National Tasks; (2) Using AI with Comparative Judgement National Tasks; (3) Comparative Judgement Custom tasks; (4) Writing Hub; (5) Automark

Comparative Judgement National Tasks

• As a subscriber to Improving Secondary Writing, you can take part in all the ISW national writing tasks. Our national writing tasks follow a set calendar. Hundreds of schools and thousands of students take part in them, allowing us to provide you with nationally-standardised data.
• Our 2025-25 Comparative Judgement secondary writing assessment calendar is here. It has all the key deadlines for every assessment. For each assessment, there is an upload deadline and a judging deadline. Make sure you know when these are!

Here is an overview of what you need to do for each assessment, with links to more detail.

• We'll release the task before the writing week, and you can download it.
• Upload a list of your student names to the task, and then download and print personalised answer sheets for every student. Read the guide here.
• Get your students to respond to the task on the answer sheets during the writing week.
• Scan and upload their completed responses by the upload deadline.
• Get your teachers to judge the writing during the judging week. The deadline for completing the judging is the Friday of judging week. Here's more advice about organising the judging.
• Download your results reports.

Using AI with Comparative Judgement National Tasks

This year, for the first time, you can enhance your Comparative Judgement assessments with AI. If you want to use these new AI features, you will need to read and accept our new AI GDPR agreement.

• Read our GDPR agreement here.
• We recommend notifying parents. Read our draft parent letter here.
• Accept the agreement by switching on AI features in your account. Read the guide to doing this here.
• Once you accept the agreement, we will automatically set your national tasks to 90% AI judgements, 10% human. You can change this ratio by following the instructions here.

If you turn on AI features, you will get the following benefits.

• You will be able to add AI judges to your Comparative Judgement writing assessments, which will speed up the time it takes to judge. Our recommended 90%-10% split will cut down your judging time by 90% but retain human oversight of every script. Read our analysis of how long it will take each teacher to judge here.
• You will get AI feedback reports. We have four new PDF feedback reports available: (1) audio feedback; (2) whole-class audio feedback; (3) student report and (4) teacher report. We also have an AI disagreement report. You can access them all via our new interactive dashboard.
• When your human teachers are judging, they will be able to toggle between handwritten and transcribed scripts. Read more here.

Comparative Judgement Custom Tasks

• As well as our national tasks, you can set up custom Comparative Judgement tasks where you can choose your own task and your own deadlines.
• Read more about setting up non-AI custom tasks here. These are free.
• Subscribers can now purchase credits that will allow them to set up AI custom tasks. You can read all the details of how this works here.

The Writing Hub

• All Improving Secondary Writing subscribers get free access to our Writing Hub website, where we share all our insights about writing. You can view it here and log in using the same username and password as the main No More Marking website.
• The Writing Hub is also where we share our Writing Progression lessons and guides. Our Writing Progression consists of ten statements about writing, with a short lesson and quiz attached to each one.
• The Writing Progression is designed for KS2 & KS3 students and you can use it flexibly to suit your school's circumstances. Read a case study of how one school have used it here.
• You can give staff at your school access to the Writing Hub. See this help article here for more information.

Automark

All Improving Secondary Writing subscribers get free access to Automark, which automatically marks paper-based multiple-choice questions, You can use it to mark all the quizzes that are a part of our Writing Progression, and you can also use it to set your own paper-based quizzes.

• Read more about how to set quizzes using Automark.
• Read more about the reports you can get from Automark for the Writing Progression.

Updated on: 22/09/2025