How is writing assessed across your primary school?

[twolittleboysonetiredmum]

I'm having a think about what we do and would really appreciate an idea of what others are doing.
We have an assessment system in place for marking it but I'm not keen on the actual assessment method itself. Currently each class do a 'cold' task which is a letter as suggested by Ros Wilson. I find it just ends up being a story with dear and from tagged on the end! We need to do something that is consistent across the school but im a bit stumped as to what/how!

How often do you do these assessments? We just do an assessed piece of writing at the end of each unit of work, so each year group does them at different times. We have regular moderation sessions to secure judgements. In the past, we have done them each half term and have specified the genre, ensuring a range is covered over the year. That can be tricky though - no good specifying a piece of report writing for the whole school if some year groups have been working on fiction, for example.

We do them termly but submit a mark every half term too. (We're just out of RI so are coming out of regular assessment back to just termly).
I've been thinking along the lines of what you do but know my head will be concerned about it not being consistent and comparable across the age ranges. And also it not being an independent piece of writing either. Have you ever found there to be big discrepancies in marks when moderating? Do the chn ever do 'cold' tasks with no prior learning?

We have started moderating with other local schools - really helpful in one form entry schools. Also a great opportunity to get new ideas/support one another.

No, we don't do cold assessments. If you specified which genres you wanted assessed over the year, you could build up a portfolio of examples for each genre that you could refer back to the following year. Does that make sense?! We moderate across year groups and with other schools too.

Consistency for us is that we all use Ros Wilson to assess pieces of writing but each class does the genres that fit their topics. We had a meeting to check coverage across the school across the year to check all writing types were covered.
I'm Y6 so do a Big Write most weeks to build a portfolio of assessed independent pieces to give a selection to choose their best examples from for SATs assessment but other year groups are expected to do an assessed Big Write every fortnight.
Each term, the record of the number of ticks/Standards are then given to the Literacy Coordinator to keep an eye on progress (or lack of) although of course the class teacher can also see the pattern. By RAG rating each piece we can also see a trend of a genre they all struggled with or a child who is not making progress.
We are one form entry so have cluster moderation sessions with other schools.
In July, the whole school will then watch a clip from Literacy Shed and produce a cold piece of writing in any genre they choose at their Standard which the Literacy Coordinator marks for consistency and analyses the results to see which areas of writing are general weak points. This is the only cold assessed writing we do. All other assessments are after feature and subject input for a piece of writing.