One-third of Year 9 students in Australia are now writing at a primary school level, according to new findings from the Australian Education Research Organisation (AERO) – an alarming indicator of what experts are calling a “30-year policy failure.”
Experts say the current focus on standardised testing, particularly through standardised assessments like NAPLAN, has resulted in a classroom culture where checklists outweigh creativity.
With punctuation and paragraph structure dominating assessment rubrics, educators caution that students’ voice and identity are being sidelined. Combined with a crowded curriculum and the pressure of league tables, writing risks becoming everyone’s responsibility but no one’s priority.
For Dr Ian Hunter, a leading education consultant and academic, addressing the writing slump requires an explicit, whole-school writing system from Prep to Year 12. In 2011, he founded Writer’s Toolbox, a patented AI-powered program designed to teach – rather than do – the writing for students.
Since the program’s inception, it has seen some promising results.
In 2023, it won New Zealand’s prestigious Hi-Tech Award for creativity in educational technology, now improving writing outcomes worldwide.
With persistent concerns over whether AI might be exacerbating rather than improving young peoples’ writing outcomes, The Educator sat down with Dr Ian Hunter to discuss how Writer’s Toolbox is fostering deep, cross-curricular learning through emotionally intelligent AI, redefining writing assessment, and supporting inclusive education while addressing the practical concerns of time-poor educators.
TE: Toolbox’s educational AI is described as a holistic solution aimed at building confident, self-aware learners. What design choices were made to support the emotional and cognitive development of students – not just their writing ability?
Design emanates from principles. Great design should be intuitive and fun. It should excite in the moment of use and pull the creative spirit. Now, it’s commonplace in design to talk about form follows function. But with educational software, the two are symbiotic. The student must want to use the programme – which is an emotional yearning – and in that moment of vulnerability when their skills or knowledge are challenged have the faith that our software will help them authentically grow and succeed.
Ultimately, getting a person to grow is a cascade of design decisions. From words to imagery, to metacognitive steps in learning processes, to applying what neuroscience tells us about how we best learn, to sensory control, to white-space. The type, frequency, and tone of feedback, multi-modal learning experiences: everything carefully sequenced and designed to take a student on a purposeful educational journey.
So, when we built Toolbox, we assembled a skunkworks team of 20 people and set them apart in a room for three years for the design and build. Nothing else. Just imagine and build the future. Everything was scrutinised and crafted to create an immersive design experience that honours the user’s emotional and cognitive state.
TE: Many edtech tools tend to focus narrowly on surface features like grammar, structure and spelling. As the founder of Writer’s Toolbox, what does ‘holistic writing development’ mean to you, and how does that philosophy shape what the AI prioritises in its feedback?
Think about the feelings many students associate with the act of writing: they might say they don’t like writing, or they aren’t a good writer, or they are a struggling writer with a deep-seated fear of even starting a piece of writing. These are whole-person problems: of efficacy, of awareness, of confidence, of faith, of fear, of courage.
It’s the same with how you apply AI. The moment you add a relational experience, you have crossed an emotional divide, not just a cognitive one. A relationship is forged with the user. Which means, as a design team, you must understand these moments deeply. We take this seriously.
So that means no generative AI – this is critical. Our AI is Educational. When the student hits ‘Feedback’ on a piece of writing, our AI works out dozens of strengths and weaknesses. But it’s a disservice to show all that to the student. Instead, they see targeted feedback on the two strongest features of that piece – because success must always be celebrated – and two things to work on. When the student works on those two things, they see their overall writing quality score improve. Then we show them the next two things to work on: all in clear language differentiated to their writing ability level, happening at their most teachable moment.
TE: The CSI diagnostic test seems to offer a new standard in writing assessment. In your view, what makes it more effective than other writing tests used in Australian schools today?
Well firstly, our Composition Skills Index (CSI) writing diagnostic test was built from the start to be the most comprehensive writing test available: it tests more writing metrics than any other test presently on the market. As much as certain curriculum systems try and push it, research shows that focussing on grammar, spelling – those surface level features – does not lead to superior communication abilities and educational success. In fact, to grow in the mastery of writing, you have to flip it. When you focus on the deeper stuff first – such as sentence-style automaticity, development of ideas, coherence, precision – lower-order skills like grammatical accuracy jump without direct intervention. So, our CSI test is designed to capture and benchmark all these metrics for schools – to show them objectively where a student should be performing – and provide interventions to address any gaps.
Another factor is the CSI can assess students of any age range from Year 2 to Year 12. Most other tests have been built around testing at a particular milestone, like PAT testing when you move from primary to high school. Or, exam testing, which means you never know until it is too late to affect change. With the CSI test, you can test at any time, at any year level, and begin to make immediate educational interventions.
Finally, pre and post test. Our comparative test shows the value add to a student across a 12-month interval. NAPLAN gives you a shot in time, which is useful, but two years have transpired between years 5 and 7 for example. A lot happens educationally in this period. The CSI test means three weeks after the test, you have writing profiles and interventions for whole-school, cohort, year level, and individual students. That’s a powerful educational tool.
TE: We know that writing is a critical discipline in not just English but across all subjects. How does Writer’s Toolbox support cross-curricular learning for students with special needs?
Great question. On one hand we take a broad view on needs: the student could be a reluctant writer, or an overly confident writer, or an over-writer, or an under-writer, or someone who has great ideas but delivers them in sweeping generalisations. English may be a second language. All of these, and more, are legitimate writing hindrances which cause students to underperform across subject areas. Fix it in writing, and you elevate their performance across the board.
Then on the other hand there are a group of students who have further learning challenges: dyslexia, dyspraxia, autism, ADHD. How do you assist these students? We purposely built into Toolbox’s design best practice research in these areas. From the smaller things like bolding text for those with ADHD, to the deeper ones. We know giving the student control over the pace and type of their learning is important. So is providing frequent, differentiated written feedback. Allowing bite-sized learning matters, as does writing scaffolds to support metacognition, and the curated use of organising tools to limit digital distraction. All with differentiation settings for schools to apply to ensure each student receives a personalised learning experience for their unique needs. And we know from teacher feedback, Toolbox has proved highly effective with students in these groupings.
TE: What would your advice be to school leaders who are concerned that they don’t have the time or budget to implement a new writing program?
Well, first you have to understand that improvement in writing delivers a disproportionate educational impact across a school. For when we write, we don’t just represent thoughts on a page. The act of writing is where we do our thinking. So, when you lift your school’s writing abilities, you get a lift in critical thinking skills, in creativity, in adaptability, deeper problem solving, improved metacognitive skills. Across all subject areas. Writing is transformative.
Then it’s about building teacher capability: something school leaders already invest heavily in. But in a recent NSW poll, 60 per cent of teachers said they lacked the confidence to teach writing well. That’s a glaring gap, desperate to be addressed. So, at Toolbox, we start the writing journey with teacher capability building, with interactive workshops designed to lift the capability of your staff to teach writing across the curriculum.
Then there’s the software itself: it’s designed to save teacher time through its real-time, individualised feedback and to reduce workload (such as time spent marking). This means teachers can prioritise learning time and quality discussions with students.
Lastly, talk to us. We’re practiced at ensuring Toolbox fits a school’s budget and capacity: we’re in small rural state schools all the way up to large private colleges. What’s more, we have dedicated School Success Managers walk alongside your team, augmenting your leadership with best practice advice and guidance – so you’re never going it alone.