Timely effective feedback of faster, fairer assessments at Armidale Catholic Schools
CLIENT
Armidale Catholic Schools
SERVICES
AI Implementation, Data Services Implementation, Change Management
YEAR
2024
Executive Summary
Armidale Catholic Schools engaged Bailey Abbott to co-design and deliver an AI-powered writing assessment solution to improve the efficiency, consistency and quality of student writing assessments across its school network. The solution enables fairer, faster and more data-informed decisions about writing, moderation and feedback. It also reduces teachers’ manual workload by supporting collaborative moderation.
Armidale Catholic Schools co-designed a Power BI dashboard with Bailey Abbott to complement the AI writing assessment tool. The dashboard was piloted across schools to gather feedback and refine the experience. It provides leaders with clear, actionable insights into student writing progress at both cohort and individual levels.
The co-designed writing assessment solution returned time to teachers, improved the quality and consistency of marking, and established a shared evidence base to guide interventions and monitor student progress across Armidale Catholic Schools.
Armidale Catholic Schools (ACS) is proud to affirm our professional and collaborative partnership with Bailey Abbott. This alliance is founded on a shared commitment to empowering our educators through the Data EcoSystem, a platform that transforms raw
information into a visual catalyst for future learning.
John Clery, School Performance Leader
Client Overview
Armidale Catholic Schools comprises 24 schools: 19 primary schools, 2 central K-10 schools and 3 secondary schools. They educate around 6000 students and employ approximately 1000 staff. Their schools are spread across a wide regional, rural, and remote area in the New England and North-West regions of NSW.
The Armidale Catholic Schools Office provides system support to schools across a range of areas, including employment services, finance, facilities, ICT, mission, learning, marketing and administration.
Challenge
Teachers play a critical role in assessing student writing and providing meaningful feedback that supports learning. However, the process can be time intensive and approaches to marking can vary between classrooms. Armidale Catholic Schools wanted a way to support teachers with faster feedback and more consistent insights, while strengthening their ability to track writing progress, compare results and guide targeted support across schools.
A scalable, AI-powered solution was needed to embed consistency, accelerate feedback and enable a more data-informed approach to writing assessment across the network.
Armidale Catholic Schools sought to modernise and standardise the assessment process by:
- Reducing the time burden on teachers by streamlining the marking workflow.
- Improving the timeliness of feedback with clear, actionable next steps, while supporting fair and consistent marking across schools, classes and year levels.
- Creating a reliable, system-wide dataset to inform curriculum planning and resource allocation.
- Equipping school leaders with the insights needed to track student writing progress and target support.
- Supporting teachers with tools that augment their expertise while maintaining professional judgement.
- Ensuring the assessment approach aligns authentically with the NSW Syllabus and Armidale Catholic Schools’ system-wide non-negotiables.
Solution
In an innovative partnership, Armidale Catholic Schools with Bailey Abbott, co-designed, developed and delivered an AI-powered writing assessment tool using Azure OpenAI Services. The tool reviews student writing samples, applies a structured marking rubric, and returns suggested scores with tailored feedback. It serves as a first-pass assessment, providing teachers with a consistent baseline to review and refine as needed. The solution was embedded into existing school workflows to ensure it complemented current assessment practices rather than replacing them.
To support data-driven follow-up, Bailey Abbott also built an AI Writer’s Insight Analysis dashboard in Microsoft Power BI. This dashboard provided a clear view of writing performance across students and cohorts, helping educators identify common challenges, track improvement over time and target support where it was needed most.
The Pilot engagement ran from July to December 2024 and included:
- AI model configuration and moderating to reflect assessment rubrics
- Power BI dashboard development to visualise assessment outcomes
- Integration into school workflows
- Support materials to upskill staff and build trust in the tool
Outcome
Through the collaboration between Armidale Catholic Schools and Bailey Abbott, Power BI writing visualisations were co-designed and piloted to reflect the needs of the system. The solution gives teachers timely, accessible insight into student writing data and supports more data-informed collaboration and more descriptive feedback for students. It has improved how quickly writing data can be accessed and analysed, strengthening how schools use evidence to inform teaching and learning.
Armidales Catholic School’s partnership with Bailey Abbott and the creation of the Power BI visualisations aligned with and is supporting:
- Improved consistency in writing assessment across all participating schools
- Greater teacher confidence in marking outcomes.
- Executives gaining access to a more reliable, standardised dataset for cohort comparison
- Power BI dashboards delivered insights into student performance, helping target interventions and support