The inclusion of writing in large-scale surveys poses particular logistic and economic challenges for survey designers, not to mention challenges associated with ensuring the reliability of the assessment results. Despite the difficulties, writing assessment has regularly taken its place alongside reading assessment in the national surveys of English Language attainment undertaken for many years within Scotland's Assessment of Achievement Programme (AAP). The AAP is this year replaced by a new programme - the Scottish Survey of Achievement (SSA) - which extends national attainment reporting to reporting at the level of individual education authorities. This particular reporting remit for the SSA demands a very large increase in the scale of the annual surveys, and imposes new burdens of pupil testing on the schools involved. The 2005 SSA focuses on English Language, and the presentation describes the form that writing assessment is to take in the survey, and how the assessment of writing is to be used to serve two different purposes: firstly, to provide national and authority attainment estimates for writing, and secondly to provide a significant opportunity for nationwide professional development through teacher involvement in the assessment of writing and in the moderation of assessment judgments.