Recent policy developments in England have, to some extent, relaxed the hold of external, high-stakes assessment on teachers of students in the early years of secondary education. In such a context, there is the opportunity for teachers to reassert the importance of teacher assessment as the most reliable means of judging a student's abilities. A recent project jointly undertaken by the National Association for the Teaching of English (NATE) and the Centre for Evaluation and Monitoring (CEM) was one attempt to trial a model for the collaborative standardised assessment of students' writing. This article puts this project in the context of previous assessment initiatives in English and suggests that, given recent policy developments, now may be precisely the time for the profession to seek to be proactive in setting the assessment agenda.