Writeiq for school leaders
Reading is measured continuously. Writing is usually measured once a year, by an external test, and argued about for the other eleven months. Writeiq gives leadership a criterion-level view of writing across every class and year level, built from work teachers have already marked.
Founding Schools programme →Most schools already own something that calls itself a literacy analytics platform. Look closely at what it actually measures and it is nearly always reading: comprehension tests, phonics screens, decoding, fluency, lexile-style levels. Those are real and worth measuring. They are also not writing.
So the whole-school picture ends up lopsided. A leader can say precisely how Year 7 reading moved this term, and then, asked the same question about writing, reach for last year’s external test and a general sense of how the faculty is going. The gap is not indifference. It is that writing has been expensive to measure at scale, because it needs a human to read every piece.
Every school marks writing constantly. That evidence sits in individual teachers’ markbooks as a single overall grade, in inconsistent formats, with the criterion-level detail discarded. The analytics problem is not a lack of data. It is that the data is never captured in a comparable shape.
How students are distributed across bands, for every class and every year level, and how that shape changes over time. The first question a literacy leader asks, answerable without collecting anything from anyone.
Which criteria are strongest and weakest school-wide, not just which students are struggling. This is the view that turns into a professional learning priority rather than an intervention list.
Students sitting at Emerging across two or more tasks, surfaced automatically. A repeated pattern across tasks is a very different signal from one weak piece, and it is the one most easily missed across a whole cohort.
Which teaching priorities have actually been taught, not just which were identified. Closes the loop between what the data said to do and what happened in classrooms.
Every class against the cohort. Where one class sits consistently differently on a criterion, that is a prompt to ask whether marking needs moderating or whether that teaching is worth spreading.
The same cohort tracked across years against the same criteria, so growth is a comparison of like with like rather than of two differently-marked snapshots.
Every view filters by teacher, class, year level, writing type and task, and exports to CSV. The criterion-level record is dated and documented, which is why schools also use it as evidence in NCCD portfolios alongside the Moderation Protocol.
This is the part that decides whether a whole-school writing view is worth anything, and it is the question a sceptical Head of English should ask first.
Every figure on the leadership dashboard traces back to a specific piece of student writing, marked against a named criterion, and confirmed by the teacher who knows that student. Not a test score. Not a model’s opinion recorded as fact. A teacher’s judgement, captured in a comparable shape and rolled up.
A dashboard built on inconsistent marking produces confident-looking charts of nothing in particular. That is why the moderation layer and the analytics layer are the same product: consistent judgement first, aggregation second. If a faculty has not moderated, the honest response is to fix that before reading too much into the trend line.
Leadership analytics is the surface most likely to be oversold, because a chart is persuasive whether or not it is meaningful.
Writeiq measures writing. It does not assess reading, comprehension, phonics, decoding or fluency, and it is not a replacement for the tools that do. If you need a whole-literacy picture, this is one part of it, sitting alongside your reading data rather than replacing it. It currently covers English; other faculties are not in scope today.
Rank-weighted tasks are designed for Year 11 and 12 internal assessment, where rank order carries meaning. For Years 3 to 10, bands are the right instrument and ranking should not be used. Where ranking is shown, classes are pooled as they were marked, without correction for a hard-marking or lenient class – so the ordering is indicative, and labelled that way.
Writeiq reports how closely its analysis matched teachers’ confirmed scores for your school, but that report stays empty until your faculty completes blind moderation rounds, because only blind evidence counts. No year level from 3 to 12 carries a published accuracy claim, and we will not put a number on a chart that we cannot stand behind.
Writeiq and the IWAF framework are independent of ACARA. Writeiq is not a NAPLAN tool, is not endorsed by ACARA, and does not produce NAPLAN scores, band-equivalents or predicted results. Term-time writing evidence is a different signal from a single annual snapshot, and we treat it as one.
A leadership dashboard is only as good as the question it lets you ask on a Monday. “Which criterion is our weakest across Year 8, and which teachers have already taught it?” is a question that changes what happens next. “What is our average writing score?” is not.
So the analytics are built criterion-first, from teacher-confirmed judgements, with the moderation layer underneath rather than bolted on. Writeiq is built for Years 3 to 12, hosts school data in Australia, and is currently in pilot with an Australian secondary school.
If the whole-school writing question is the one you cannot currently answer, that is the conversation we would rather have – including where Writeiq is not the right fit.