Intent

At Merrylands Primary School and Nursery, we aim to create independent writers who are able to communicate their ideas in a clear and confident way. We feel that the teaching of writing is of paramount importance within a broad and balanced curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that every child within the school, regardless of background and potential difficulty, leaves the school as a competent writer with an understanding of the conventions of Standard English and when to use it effectively.

We believe that using a wide range of quality, diverse texts as an inspirational starting point for writing is essential, as it provides an exciting stimulus for communication and aids the children’s development of language. This also allows us to promote and encourage children’s imagination, open-mindedness and inventiveness. We are also able to stimulate an interest in words and their meanings, developing a growing vocabulary in spoken and written forms.

Our writing curriculum is a progressive learning journey that strengthens the children’s knowledge and skills and achieves success through a range of active and engaging teaching approaches. Our driver texts are carefully chosen in collaboration with teachers to achieve a balance of text types and culture, celebrate our diverse society and create progression in challenge and language development. 

Implementation

At Merrylands Primary School and Nursery, writing is taught daily across the whole school. Each class studies a different high-quality text, lasting from a few weeks to a whole term depending on text type, length and year group. In KS2, this text is often the same text that is studied during shared reading sessions. We passionately believe that reading and writing are inextricably linked, therefore studying the text in both reading and writing sessions encourages children to make links and become empathetic and ambitious writers.

As a school, we have chosen to follow the Jonathon Bond English Toolkit to support long, medium and short term planning. The use of progression maps ensures that a variety of genres are progressively taught and built upon, both throughout the year and throughout the school, preparing the children by the end of Year 6 for their learning in Key Stage 3.

Writing is also a key focus in the wider curriculum, especially in foundation subject lessons. Children are given the opportunity to transfer and build upon their knowledge of a genre studied during English lessons and apply this learning to a topic focus.

Within each unit of work, sequenced lessons ensure that prior learning is checked and built upon and that National Curriculum objectives are taught through a combination of approaches/opportunities e.g.

• opportunities to participate in drama and spoken language activities
• exploring the features of different text types and modelled examples (E.g. spotting features in a WAGOLL – What a good one looks like)
• Handwriting practise
• Vocabulary practise
• Shared writing (modelled expectations)
• Independent writing
• Planning, drafting, editing, up-levelling and presenting
• Performing
• Handwriting

Impact

Through the delivery of the writing curriculum, the children will have the knowledge and skills to be able to write successfully for a purpose and audience. The children will have expansive vocabularies and be confident writers who have the ability to plan, draft and edit their own work.  By the end of key stage 2, children will be resilient writers. They will be able to manipulate language, grammar and punctuation to create effect.

As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, we aim for a consistent writing standard across the curriculum and actively encourage skills taught in the English lesson to be transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific language, grammar and punctuation.

We measure the impact of the writing curriculum using a range of formative and summative assessment procedures.  Gaps in learning are identified, including identifying strengths and areas for development within the writing strands and this information is used to plan future lessons according to these outcomes.

The subject is monitored regularly to measure the impact of the writing curriculum content, design and delivery and the outcomes of this monitoring are used to drive forward next steps within the subject.