A unique and nationally representative dataset of student writing in Sweden, spanning more than 20 consecutive years, is available in a national student essay archive. However, this is not available for quantitative analysis because of the extensive work required to transcribe and assess a sufficiently large sample of student essays with adequate reliability. In January-March 2026, we conducted a pilot project in which a model for handwritten text recognition (HTR) adapted to handwritten texts produced by Swedish 15-year-old students was trained and tested. The results of the pilot project were highly promising and will form a basis for a larger project application. We ask for continuation of the NAISS resource to enable fine-tuning and application of the model, as well as maintain the infrastructure for the main project application, that concerns digitizing and analyzing a large-scale corpus of nationally representative student essays.