Intent

At Our Lady School, the teaching of writing is of paramount importance within a broad and balanced curriculum. Our aim is to ensure that every child within our school, whatever their starting point or need, leaves our school as a confident and competent writer with an understanding of the conventions of Standard English and when to use it effectively. This ability to write with confidence for a range of purposes and audiences ensures that children leave Our Lady fully prepared for their secondary education, ready to achieve their aspirations and thrive throughout their life.

The writing curriculum at Our Lady encourages children to immerse themselves in different text types, understand the features and impact of these, and realise the importance of them beyond education. A secure knowledge of spelling and grammar and an understanding of how to edit writing is taught throughout the school in a systematic and progressive way.

Implementation

At Our Lady School, children receive a one hour writing lesson each day. Each class studies a different high-quality text, lasting from a few weeks to a whole half term depending on the literacy type, length and year group.

The use of the writing progression map ensure that a variety of genres are progressively taught and built upon both throughout the year and the school to support the consolidation and retrieval of knowledge and vocabulary.

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

Through the adaptive teaching texts that support all levels of writers in the writing process, children acquire and learn the skills to plan, draft, apply and edit their work over time and are encouraged to develop independence in being able to identify their own areas for improvement in all pieces of writing.

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 activities
• Exploring the features of different text types and modelled examples (spotting language and genre features in a WAGOLL – What A Good One Looks Like)
• Handwriting practise
• Vocabulary practise
• Shared writing (modelled expectations)
• Discrete spelling lessons
• Independent writing
• Planning, drafting, editing, up-levelling and presenting
• Performing

Impact

The impact on our children is that they have the knowledge and skills to be able to write successfully for a purpose and audience. With the implementation of the writing sequence being established and taught in both key stages, children are becoming more confident writers and have the ability to plan, draft and edit their own work. By the end of Key Stage 2, children have developed a writer’s craft, they enjoy sustained writing and can manipulate language, grammar and punctuation to create effect. As all aspects of English are an integral part of the curriculum, cross curricular writing standards have also improved and skills taught in the English lesson are transferred into other subjects; this shows consolidation of skills and a deeper understanding of how and when to use specific language, grammar and punctuation.