Intent
At Willow, we value writing as a key life skill and are committed to enabling our pupils to be able to write for a range of different purposes and audiences. We intend to develop writers who can re-read, edit and improve their own writing, with a focus on the impact on the reader, as well as confidently using the essential skills of grammar, punctuation and spelling. We set high expectations for our children to take pride in their work both in terms of its quality and presentation, and ensure that it is shared with the audience and seek feedback from them. By the end of Year 6, we intend that our children will be able to write confidently across the curriculum and express their thoughts and ideas clearly and creatively through the written word.
Our key goal is to enable all children to communicate confidently in writing and this achieved by supporting pupils to develop fluency and automaticity in key skills such as transcription before moving on to compositional tasks and developing disciplinary knowledge as a writer.
Careful links are made across the curriculum to ensure that children’s English learning is relevant and meaningful: where possible linking our reading, writing and the topic that we are covering across the wider curriculum. We ensure that children develop an understanding of how widely writing is used in everyday life and, therefore, how important and useful the skills are that they are learning.
Our intentions in writing are for children to:
Implementation
The curriculum is implemented using an evidence-led approach, using the EEF Improving Literacy Guidance Report and the Exceed Learning Partnership (ELP) writing curriculum and teaching sequence.
The Exceed Learning Partnership Writing Curriculum is based on the National Curriculum and has a clear skills and knowledge progression. This ensures that skills and knowledge are built on year by year and sequenced appropriately to maximise learning for all children.
The programmes of study for writing distinguish between ‘transcription’ and ‘composition’. Pupils need sufficient capacity in their working memory to plan, compose and review effectively. This requires transcription skills to be secure. As a result, fluent transcription skills are a critical focus for the Early Years and Key Stage.
1. Substantive knowledge -this is the core component knowledge and transcriptional skills so that pupils are able to write. We teach these through explicit instruction as well as through direct application within writing lessons and cross-curriculum opportunities to write. The substantive concepts that we develop through our writing curriculum are:
2. Disciplinary knowledge – In addition to the core knowledge required to be successful within each of these elements, our curriculum outlines key aspects of how we intend to develop working as a writer. We organise our curriculum so that it focuses on developing different aspects of these competencies at different points. The features of working as a writer in our writing curriculum are:
Plan Draft Revise Edit Publish
Children are encouraged to critique work and think about the impact their composition has on a reader.
In all year groups, we teach writing either through high-quality texts or by establishing real purpose for writing linked to curriculum topics or stimulating world events. This is because we intend for children to be inspired by writing by ensuring purpose is authentic.
Over their time at the school, children will write a variety of fiction and non-fiction texts, including recounts, reports, explanation texts, poems, instructions and stories of all kinds. We use drama, role-play, storytelling and discussion to engage the imagination, before moving on to vocabulary exploration, sentence craft and creative writing.
The typical writing unit follows a 2–3-week sequence and follows this sequence to develop disciplinary knowledge:
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