Teacher assessment moderation: standardisation and training process
Source: gov.uk (2025-10-31)

Information for local authorities on training and standardisation for moderators of key stages 2 (KS2) English writing.

What is standardisation?

Standardisation gives schools the assurance that local authorities’ moderation teams have the required knowledge to moderate KS2 English writing teacher assessments.

It ensures:
- teacher assessment and its moderation across England is consistent and accurate
- that local authorities’ moderators for the academic year 2025 to 2026 are familiar with the KS2 English writing framework (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-assessment-frameworks-at-the-end-of-key-stage-2)
Each year, local authorities are required to moderate at least 25% of maintained schools and 25% of academies and participating independent schools that have opted into the local authority’s external KS2 moderation process.

Approval to moderate

All moderators must pass a standardisation exercise to gain the Standards and Testing Agency’s (STA) approval to moderate in the academic year 2025 to 2026.

Moderators can choose from 3 standardisation exercises. They may attempt up to 2 exercises and must successfully complete 1 exercise to gain approval to moderate.

Changes to standardisation activities

All standardisation activity will now take place on the National Curriculum Assessments Portal (NCA Portal) (https://www.ncaportal.education.gov.uk). This includes:
- accessing standardisation training materials
- completing standardisation exercises
- receiving standardisation results and ‘approval to moderate’ certificates
- accessing standardisation exercise commentaries
Setting up access to the NCA Portal

If you don’t have an NCA Portal account yet, ask a user within your organisation who has ‘account manager’ permissions to create one for you. In local authorities, this is usually a senior local authority user or moderation manager.

Senior local authority users should ensure that all local authority staff with responsibilities relating to primary assessments have the correct access to the NCA Portal.

Moderation managers should ensure that all moderators who will participate in standardisation exercises during the academic year 2025 to 2026 have access to the NCA Portal at the appropriate time.

If moderators require access as a school user and a local authority user, they will need 2 separate accounts.

You can find full instructions on requesting access and signing in, assigning roles, viewing permissions and managing user accounts in the guidance on how to use the NCA Portal (https://www.gov.uk/guidance/how-to-access-the-national-curriculum-assessments-portal).

Completing an exercise on the NCA Portal

Each standardisation exercise will be available for completion on the NCA Portal during a specific period.

When each exercise becomes available on the NCA Portal, local authority users with moderation manager permissions will be automatically notified via email.

Although the standardisation exercises are now available online, local authorities should continue their usual practices. This means moderation managers are responsible for:
- coordinating moderator participation in an exercise according to local authority arrangements
- ensuring that moderators access and complete the exercises individually, under controlled conditions at a date and time the local authority specifies
Moderation managers and moderators can access the standardisation exercises by signing into the NCA Portal and navigating to the ‘Standardisation’ page.

To complete a standardisation exercise on the NCA Portal, moderators should:
- access the exercise at a specific time and in a suitable monitored environment as instructed by their moderation manager
- start the exercise and navigate through the pupil scripts on screen
- award a standard of attainment for each pupil collection via the drop-down list
- submit their answers to complete the exercise and send for automatic marking
The system will track exercise attempts to ensure that no moderator can complete more than 2 exercises.

The standardisation exercise materials will also be available to download from the NCA Portal should local authorities wish to carry out paper-based standardisation offline. If local authorities take this approach, they should ensure individual moderators provide their responses for each pupil collection within the exercise on the NCA Portal. Otherwise, they will not receive their results or the ‘approval to moderate’ certificate, if successful.

Release of exercise commentaries and results

Standardisation exercise attempts will be automatically marked on the NCA Portal based on the commentaries STA provides.

There are 3 potential result outcomes which will be communicated to moderators via automatic email from the NCA Portal.

The exercise results and commentaries will be released on a phased basis:
- on the Monday after each exercise window closes, moderation managers can access the results and commentaries — this gives them enough time to discuss outcomes with moderators before the system releases the results
- on the Wednesday after each exercise window closes, moderators can access their results and commentaries, including the ‘approval to moderate’ certificate, if they are successful
The commentary and results release dates for each exercise can be found below within the standardisation and training timeline (#Standardisation-and-training-timeline).

Once the standardisation exercise window opens, local authorities will be able to access a report on the NCA Portal showing moderator participation, pass and fail rates for their area. This will help local authorities confirm whether they have recruited enough moderators for the academic year 2025 to 2026.

Large language model pilot

STA is piloting the use of large language models to help create standardisation exercise 3 in the academic year 2025 to 2026. Details of the pilot were communicated to moderation managers in July 2025 (https://mailchi.mp/education.gov.uk/information-upcoming-changes-to-standardisation-activities?e=be5ae9b0a5).

The purpose of the pilot is to explore whether large language models can help overcome ongoing challenges with standardisation exercise production, including sourcing sufficient scripts from schools and reducing associated costs.

Taking part in the pilot is optional. STA will only use the materials developed with the assistance of large language models to evaluate moderators’ understanding of the KS2 English writing teacher assessment framework (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/teacher-assessment-frameworks-at-the-end-of-key-stage-2).

Moderator training

The NCA Portal (https://www.ncaportal.education.gov.uk/) provides self-guided standardisation training materials for key stage 1 and KS2, with built-in guidance to help local authorities navigate them.

Additional training videos are available on STA’s YouTube playlist (https://www.youtube.com/playlist?list=PLXjcCX3hH9LXHRFtcSAR5l9Mh-ldfX5O4).

Examples of pupils’ work to support teachers’ assessment of English writing at the end of KS2 are available on Teacher assessment exemplification: KS2 English writing (https://www.gov.uk/government/publications/2018-teacher-assessment-exemplification-ks2-english-writing).

We will not publish any further training or exemplification materials for the academic year 2025 to 2026.

Local authorities can use the training materials to support their moderator training. We recommend that training is delivered to moderators before they complete the standardisation exercise, preferably on separate days.

Standardisation and training timeline

To add a full list of all important dates for local authorities relating to teacher assessment to your calendar, you can download the Key stage 2 teacher assessment and moderation - 2025 to 2026 calendar (https://assets.publishing.service.gov.uk/media/68cc05708c44a661b4995d54/Key_stage_2_teacher_assessment_and_moderation_-_2025_to_2026_Calendar.ics) (81.7 KB).

Contact us

If you have questions about moderation, moderator training or standardisation, please contact the national curriculum assessments helpline:

National curriculum assessments helpline Call: 0300 303 3013Email: assessments@education.gov.ukOnline: NCA Portal (http://www.ncaportal.education.gov.uk/) ‘Support’