What papers do they sit for KS2 literacy and how can I find out about marking?

[MrsJoeHart]

I know that there's the new SPAG paper, but what are the other literacy papers? DS isn't great at spelling and punctuation but has been getting good marks in some tests they've been doing at school in the last few weeks. His teacher has said before that if he doesn't punctuate correctly then regardless of how good the content of what he has written is then he won't get above a level 3. Is there somewhere I can find out what the requirements are for each level/sublevel?

Year 6 children sit the SPAG test where obviously punctuation is a reasonably large element and a reading test where it isn't! Then there is teacher assessment of writing levels gained over a range of writing genres and styles in independent work over the year. Here punctuation does affect the level achieved, Level 4 says "sentences demarcated accurately throughout the text, including question marks" ( Have a look at www.teachfind.com/national-strategies/assessing-pupils-progress-app-assessment-guidelines ) and the Assessment Focus it comes from (AF6) is a key one to assess against. So lack of punctuation can be a limiting factor.

Ah, brilliant thank you.

He got a 4A in a recent SPAG test and a 5B in a reading test. I suspect that it's the teacher assessment part that she's referring to then. She said she was concerned that if he doesn't get a level 4 in literacy he could be put in a lower set at secondary school than is strictly right for him. He's on track for level 5 maths.

Do you know if the teacher assessment applies to work done over a set period of time or are there set pieces that are assessed?

Depends how the school assess and whether the local authority has provided guidance on what they expect to see if moderating. We are expected to provide examples of
normal everyday classwork
extended writing with "support"-basically we do Big Write every week and talk about it before we write!
extended writing-cold, just "here is a title/picture, get on with it!"
writing across the curriculum, so writing in history, geography, science etc rather than just in the Literacy lesson.
Our authority looks at a range of work from January to June ( when they moderate) and any assessment that we do in addition to the above!

Our Teacher Assessment of our Writing levels was moderated last year. In addition, our Moderator was moderated himself!

My assessment was (thank heavens) all supported, but one thing that the moderator emphasised was that writing cannot be levelled at 4 if the basic sentence structure is not secure. This has focussed my mind very effectively on those children with fantastic ideas but a tendency to write stream-of-consciousness paragraphs with a capital letter at the beginning and one full stop at the end.

And yes, spaniel is right that the moderator will want to look at writing in Geography, Science, RE and History books to check that they don't think that 'writing only matters in the orange books'.