The rubric illustrates a typical developmental pathway in children’s earliest writing. The visual examples are illustrative rather than prescriptive. Children’s development is rarely linear and they may demonstrate characteristics from several stages simultaneously.
A1. Control Of Marking Tools
This dimension considers how intentionally children use drawing and writing tools.
Stage 1: Marks are largely uncontrolled and exploratory. Children enjoy making movements with pens, pencils or crayons but their marks show little evidence of deliberate control.
Stage 2: Children begin to gain control over their movements. You’ll notice that they intentionally make repeated shapes, lines or circles and are beginning to produce marks for a purpose/reason/audience.
Stage 3: Marks are becoming increasingly deliberate and controlled. Children intentionally create simple drawings to communicate their ideas alongside their emergent writing.
Stage 4: Children demonstrate confident control of writing tools. Their drawings and writing are purposeful, organised and used intentionally to represent their ideas.
A2. Representation Of Ideas
This dimension focuses on whether children’s marks represent meaning.
Stage 1: Marks do not appear to represent any identifiable objects or ideas.
Stage 2: Some drawings or marks occasionally resemble familiar objects or ideas, although child explanation or adult interpretation will likely be needed.
Stage 3: Children regularly create recognisable representations of people, objects and events.
Stage 4: Drawings consistently communicate identifiable ideas and often include increasing detail.
A3. Language Use
This dimension is related to the process of making their ‘writing’. It considers children’s use of their available languages during storytelling and composition.
Stage 1: Children communicate primarily through gesture, expression or action rather than through spoken language.
Stage 2: Children typically use one language while explaining or discussing their drawings and emergent writing.
Stage 3: For multilingual children, you’ll notice that they might occasionally move between languages when explaining ideas or composing.
Stage 4: Some children confidently and naturally draw upon their languages to express and develop their ideas.
A4. Communication Of Ideas
This dimension considers how effectively children communicate meaning through drawing, talk and early writing.
Stage 1: The intended message is difficult to determine.
Stage 2: Children communicate simple ideas but often require child explanation and adult questioning to fully make sense of it.
Stage 3: The main message is usually clear and understandable.
Stage 4: Children communicate coherent, detailed messages that others can understand independently.
A5. Engagement And Creativity
This dimension reflects children’s motivation to participate in writing and drawing activities.
Stage 1: Children’s interest in mark making, drawing and book-making can be fleeting.
Stage 2: Interest and engagement is growing, with occasional creative experimentation.
Stage 3: Children willingly engage in drawing and writing activities, often developing their own picturebooks (and other writings) in their own time.
Stage 4: Children show sustained engagement, independence and creativity.
B1. Formation Of Shapes
This dimension considers the development of increasingly conventional graphic forms in children’s book-making.
Stage 1: Children produce random marks or shapes that do not resemble letters.
Stage 2: Occasionally, some shapes may begin to resemble letters.
Stage 3: Children produce a mixture of letter-like shapes and fully conventional letters.
Stage 4: Letter formation is recognisable.
B2. Recognition Of Scripts
This dimension considers children’s awareness of different writing systems.
Stage 1: Children do not distinguish between different scripts.
Stage 2: Children begin recognising one writing system and attempt to reproduce some of its features.
Stage 3: Children, particularly your multilingual writers, recognise that different languages use different scripts and begin distinguishing between them.
Stage 4: Children who are multilingual appropriately select and use the correct script for each language. Sometimes they’ll combine different scripts together.
B3. Language Integration
This dimension reflects how children draw upon their linguistic resources while composing.
Stage 1: Languages remain separate or are not yet used during writing.
Stage 2: For multilingual children, one language predominates during storytelling and writing.
Stage 3: Children occasionally combine their languages while developing ideas.
Stage 4: Children flexibly integrate their languages according to their purpose and audience.
B4. Representation Of Sound
This dimension considers children’s growing understanding of the relationship between sound and print.
Stage 1: Their marks do not represent the sounds of spoken language.
Stage 2: Children begin using individual letters or letter-like shapes to represent some of the sounds they know. They will use lines or scribbles for the sounds they don’t yet know (also called ‘kid writing’.
Stage 3: Many sounds within words are represented, often using plausible phonetic spellings. For example, the opening and last sound in a word. They will continue to use ‘kid writing’ for the sounds they don’t yet know.
Stage 4: Children consistently represent most sounds in words, with their spellings being plausible and increasingly conventional.
Final thoughts
These stages describe a continuum of development, not a checklist. Children may:
Demonstrate characteristics from different stages at the same time.
Progress more rapidly in some dimensions than others.
Move forwards and backwards depending on context, task or language.
Show different profiles across drawing, oral language and writing.
The visual exemplars are intended to support professional judgement by providing typical examples of children’s emerging writing behaviours. They should be interpreted alongside children’s talk, intentions and explanations, recognising that meaning often develops through the interaction between drawing, oral language and writing rather than through written marks alone.
Finally, for guidance, we’d typically expect:
Pre-nursery: Most children will show evidence of Stage 1-2. A few may go beyond this.
Nursery: Most children will show evidence of Stage 1-2. Some may go beyond this.
Reception: While some children will be at Stage 1, most children will show evidence of Stage 2-3. Some will be at Stage 4.
Year One: Most children should be at Stage 4. However, there will be some children showing evidence of being anywhere between Stage 1-4.
References and recommended further reading
Papadopoulos, I. (2026). Emergent Writing in Early Childhood: Developmental Patterns in Drawing, Scribbling, and Letter-Like Forms. International Journal of Early Childhood, 1-18. [LINK]
Byington, T. A., & Kim, Y. (2017). Promoting preschoolers’ emergent writing. YC Young Children, 72(5), 74-82. [LINK]
Young, R. (2026) Debunking edu-myths: Children should only write words they can spell [LINK]
In many primary classrooms, children are routinely asked to sit down and write: to think of an idea, turn it into a series of sentences and transcribe those sentences accurately and legibly, all in one uninterrupted act. This is what writing researchers call parallel processing [LINK]. The simultaneous activation of all the different production strategies involved in writing at once. For skilled adult writers, this is possible because many of those production strategies have become fluent for us through the years. For younger writers, whose transcription is still effortful, and whose writing experiences are still limited, it is not. Asking young children to write this way does not ‘stretch them’ towards a higher standard. It just caps the standard they can reach.
Understanding what to do instead is the subject of this article.
⚠️ Why parallel processing is the wrong starting point for young writers
To understand why parallel processing is developmentally inappropriate for young writers, we first need to understand what writing actually requires the brain to do.
Drawing on the work of Graham, Olive and others (see LINK), we might suggest that writing involves three distinct levels of mental processing which trickle down into each other.
Conceptual processing. This is where writing ideas are born! This is where writers decide what they want to say, who they want to say it to, and retrieve relevant content knowledge from their memory, before shaping their thinking into some kind of plan.
This then informs their:
Linguistic processing. This is where sentences take shape. This is where the brain converts their plan into words and sentences. This includes selecting the right words, building syntactic structures, and working out the spelling of the words they wish to write down.
This then informs their:
Motor processing. This is where the sentences are transcribed onto the page.
Once the words are on the page, this can inform further conceptualisation or reconceptualising.
All three levels of processing draw on the same shared cognitive resource: working memory. Our brain’s limited and temporary workspace (LINK). In parallel processing, all three levels are being activated simultaneously. The writer is thinking about what to say, constructing the language to say it, and physically producing it on the page, all at the same moment. For young writers, all this simultaneous processing will invariably overload their working memory, causing hardship for children and heartache for teachers!
For young writers, transcribing can be extremely effortful, slow and attention-consuming. It has not yet been automated through sufficient instruction and practice. This means that the motor level of processing places enormous demands on working memory. These demands leave very little capacity available for the conceptual and linguistic work of composition.
The result? When we ask young children to write in parallel, the result is usually pretty predictable: ideas become impoverished, sentences simplified, word choices narrowed and texts become less ambitious than the child’s actual thinking and creativity. The child may transcribe some words onto the page but those words will not reflect what the child is capable of thinking, imagining, or saying. We think that’s a shame.
This is the cost of asking young writers to undertake parallel processing.
✅ Why a sequential process is more developmentally appropriate
If parallel processing overtaxes young writers, what should we be doing instead? The answer is sequential processing. This is where we ask children to handle the different levels of writing one at a time, in order, rather than all at once. The diagram below shows the difference.
In sequential processing, the young writer handles the conceptual work first: generating ideas, deciding what to say and creating a plan. Then they handle the linguistic work of constructing sentences. Then, and only then, do they turn to transcription: the motor work of getting those sentences onto the page. Each level of processing receives the child’s full cognitive attention in turn, rather than having to compete with the others.
When children are free to do their compositional thinking before picking up their pen, that thinking can be as ambitious, detailed and imaginative as the child is capable of. There is no handwriting pressure narrowing their ideas or needing to simplify their language. When they then turn to transcription, their working memory can devote itself almost entirely to the motor demands of transcribing, because the compositional decisions have already been made and put down on paper via drawings or a plan. Every part of the process is given the cognitive time and space it needs. Every part is therefore able to operate at a higher level.
📚 Our book-making approach: The perfect scaffold for the sequential process
Knowing that sequential processing is developmentally appropriate is one thing. Building it systematically into classroom practice is another. Our book-making approach offers a complete, structured framework for doing exactly this. One that maps directly onto the three levels of processing and gives each one the dedicated cognitive space it needs.
Our book-making approach works through a deliberate four-stage sequence, each stage preparing the ground for the one that follows.
STAGE ONE: ‘Idea parties’ and making front covers
Once a book-making project has been introduced, children generate their ideas for the project through talk and by having an ‘ideas party’. The teacher facilitates these discussions in which children decide what their books will be about: the characters, the events, the information they want to share and the overall shape of their story or information text. This is high-level conceptual work. You’re setting the communicative purpose and establishing the audience for the books. This is composition at its most expansive, unencumbered by any transcriptional demand whatsoever. Lovely.
Once children have settled on their book idea, they make their front covers. They choose a title and draw a front cover. This is not a decorative activity! It is planning. The child declares, in a form that is visible, what their book is about and what kind of writer they are being. The conceptual framework of the book is being established. The child knows their subject. Their working memory can now begin to establish their plan…
STAGE TWO: Drawing their ideas on each page
With the big idea settled, and the front cover made, children move through their book page by page, drawing what will happen or what will be discussed on each. By the time this stage is complete, the child has produced a complete, sequenced and visual compositional plan.
The cognitive significance of this is substantial. Drawing externalises the child’s conceptual thinking, taking it out of working memory and placing it on the page in a visible form (LINK). Ideas that would otherwise need to be held in working memory are now safely on the page. The children can look at them, point to them and return to them at any point. Their mental desk has been cleared of this conceptual load.
This means that everything that follows, oral rehearsal and transcription, can proceed without the child simultaneously trying to remember what they wanted to write about. The drawing at the top of the page holds the answer. Working memory is free for the work that comes next…
STAGE THREE: Oral rehearsal
With their drawings in front of them, children spend time developing the sentences for their pages. First, they do this at the text level. ‘Telling’ the whole of their story or information book.
Next, pointing to a drawing, they construct and rehearse the sentence(s) they will write on that particular page, trying out different word choices and adjusting the structure through feedback before any transcription begins.
Because the conceptual content is already secured on the page, the child can see exactly what they want to say. Oral rehearsal can then focus almost entirely on the linguistic level of processing: how to say it. The teacher can push for precise word choices, more sophisticated sentence structures, and well-chosen connecting language because neither child nor teacher is spending cognitive energy recovering or establishing the underlying writing idea. Their drawing does this heavy lifting..
When oral rehearsal follows drawing, the sequential cycle becomes: draw it, say it, then write it. The child arrives at transcription with two resolved resources already in place (the visual plan and the rehearsed language) and so working memory is free to concentrate on the motor demands of handwriting.
STAGE FOUR: Transcription
When the child picks up their pen, every major compositional decision has already been made. Transcription arrives with a single job: to encode familiar, already-owned language into written form.
The result is consistently striking to teachers who first use this approach. The ideas are strong (because they were developed without any transcriptional pressure). The language is rich (because it was crafted without the motor demands of handwriting). And the transcription itself, freed from the burden of carrying the entire writing process alone, is more fluent, more confident, and more accurate than it would otherwise be.
Teachers can also decide the transcriptional demand of this final stage to match each child’s current level of handwriting automaticity.
At the simplest level, children write a single word, phrase or sentence per page. As children’s confidence and automaticity grow, they tend to write two sentences per page, then a short paragraph. In each case, the compositional foundation remains the same. It’s only the transcriptional load that changes.
The examples below show how we can adjust our transcription expectations as children’s writing fluency develops (in earnest). As children’s fluency increases, we can increase the amount of thinking they are to transcribe in one sitting.
LEVEL ONE (Nursery – Reception): A mixture of emergent writing, single words or short phrases on each page
At Nursery and at the start of Reception, most children will use emergent writing or kid writing, as a temporary scaffold, to create their texts. However, once phonics, handwriting and spelling instruction is introduced, they’ll transition quickly onto writing single words or short phrases.
LEVEL TWO (Reception – Year One): A single sentence per page
At level two, a child can be expected to commit to a single sentence to each page of their picturebook (sometimes they’ll just be having such a great day they’ll want to do more). The cognitive demand of transcription is kept low so that a child who is still building their handwriting and spelling automaticity can create a whole text and feel the success and satisfaction that comes with that.
Our expectation is that children in Reception/Year One would learn to craft books like this. By the way, for children new to English, LEVEL ONE or LEVEL TWO is a really great place to start (LINK)
LEVEL THREE (Year One – Year Two): Multiple sentences per page
This is a small step up in transcriptional load. When children are ready, they can be asked to transcribe more of the content they have already settled on through their talk, drawing and oral rehearsals. Often, you’ll know that they’re ready because, despite asking only for a single sentence, they’ll ignore you and want to write multiple sentences on each page anyway! We find this is typical in year one and into year two.
LEVEL FOUR (Year Two – Year Three Onwards): A paragraph per page
At LEVEL FOUR, each page becomes a short paragraph of three or four sentences. This is a substantial increase in transcriptional output. Critically, though, the approach remains reassuringly consistent. The expectation is that children draft a page a day.
Seen side by side, the four levels make the composition-first argument visible. What changes is the transcriptional demand the teacher asks the child to manage in a single sitting. A teacher can move a class, a group, or an individual child between these levels at any time. Adaptive teaching becomes a matter of adjusting children’s transcriptional load, not redesigning the entire writing task!
📈 Building children towards parallel processing over time
The book-making approach as described above is an explicit, carefully scaffolded version of sequential processing. The compositional work is complete before transcription begins. This is the perfect place for young or inexperienced writers to start.
But sequential processing is not the destination. Over time, as children become more experienced, the goal is for them to move towards the more parallel, fluent processing of skilled writers. The book-making approach supports this developmental journey naturally because the demands it places on children can be increased incrementally in line with their growing capacities.
There are several ways in which we can begin to increase those demands:
Increase the length of transcriptional bursts. As children move from one sentence per page to two sentences to a paragraph, they are sustaining their handwriting for longer while holding more language in mind. A step towards the more extended transcription periods of parallel writers.
Condensing the oral rehearsal stage. As children become more experienced, you can gradually reduce the amount of explicit oral rehearsal scaffolding, inviting children to move more fluidly between their drawings and their writing. They will begin to integrate the linguistic and motor stages more closely.
Encouraging anticipatory thinking and spontaneity during transcription. More experienced writers may find that, as they transcribe one page, they are already beginning to think about the language for the next. This is the earliest sign of parallel processing. You will also notice that they begin to change their mind half way through transcribing a page or else want to return to previous pages to revise them and make them better. They also feel a need to adjust their illustrations so that they better reflect what they have finally written. This is all good stuff!
Encourage children to develop their own favoured writing process through personal writing projects. Give children access to blank picture and chapter books as well as writing journals so that they can begin to develop their own writing process away from the demands of official class writing projects [LINK].
✍️ The importance of specific handwriting and spelling instruction
Book-making sessions work best when they sit alongside regular, explicit and well-taught handwriting and spelling lessons. These lessons need to be timetabled in their own right [LINK]. Handwriting and spelling require their own short, regular, explicit sessions, separate from book-making time, where letter formation, spelling patterns, and orthographic knowledge can be taught directly and practised deliberately. Importantly, what children learn in these sessions does not stay contained within them. Instead, they use and apply all that rich learning straight into their books. Seen this way, these two kinds of lessons are feeding the same outcome from two directions.
Explicit transcription teaching builds the automaticity and fluency that book-making sessions depend on.
Book-making sessions give the real and motivating context in which children actually want to improve their transcriptional skills!
Key takeaways for the classroom
Recognise that asking young writers to use parallel processing is developmentally inappropriate. When handwriting is not yet automatic, the motor demands of transcription consume most of a child’s available working memory, leaving little capacity for the concurrent demands of idea generation and language construction.
Understand that sequential processing is a developmentally appropriate approach for young writers. Handling the compositional work before the transcriptional work (one level of processing at a time) allows each level to be done to the highest quality.
Use the book-making approach to scaffold the sequential process explicitly. Oral idea generation and front cover making settle the big conceptual picture. Page-by-page drawings externalises the whole composition before any language work begins. Oral rehearsal establishes the language for each page. Transcription then handles only the motor work of encoding. Each stage prepares the ground for the next.
Take drawing seriously as a cognitive tool. When children draw their book page by page before writing, they remove their conceptual content from working memory, placing it on the page in a stable, visible form that supports every subsequent stage. In our view, this is the single most powerful reduction in cognitive load available to a young writer.
Align transcriptional demands to each child’s current stage of handwriting and encoding automaticity. One sentence per page, two sentences per page, or a paragraph per page, our book-making approach allows teachers to increase transcriptional demand incrementally.
Increase demands gradually, when children are ready. As handwriting automatises, children can sustain longer writing bursts, require less oral rehearsal and can begin to think ahead during transcription. These are signs of emerging parallel processing. Introduce more demanding versions of book-making in response to these signs.
Teach handwriting with automaticity as the goal. Daily handwriting instruction and practice that focuses on speed, ease and accuracy progressively releases working memory for parallel processing.
How our book-making approach frees up working memory, enabling children to write with confidence by developing and organising their ideas before they have to manage transcription.
Watch any young writer sit down to transcribe a sentence and you can often see the strain. They are trying to remember what they want to say, find the words to express it, hold the sounds in their mind, and form their letters correctly, all at the same time.
This happens when schools, schemes, teachers or even so-called experts or consultants insist on asking children to deal with composition and transcription at the same time. The science of writing has, for a long time, understood that writing is not one skill but several, working together under the limits of a child’s working memory (LINK). When all of these demands land on a child simultaneously, something has to give, and it is usually the quality and ambition of the writing itself.
Our book-making pedagogy offers a more developmentally appropriate approach. Rather than asking children to generate ideas, plan, translate and transcribe all at once, we separate out these demands and sequence them carefully. Composition comes first. Transcription follows. The result is a more rigorous and systematic writing instruction. It is writing instruction that respects how much a young writer can actually hold in their mind at once.
Settling the thinking before the transcribing begins
Through our book-making approach, children spend real time on composition before they are asked to transcribe a single word. They generate ideas through ‘Idea Parties’ and use talk and drawings to decide what their book will be about. They then sequence their ideas onto the pages of their book by putting an illustration on each page. They then use these illustrations to orally rehearse the sentence(s) they want to transcribe to paper.
By the time a child picks up their pencil, the composing element is largely done. They are now in a position to focus on transcribing their ideas to paper. By settling their compositions first, book-making removes the competition in working memory.
For young writers, drawing and talking supports the compositional work of writing.
Drawing functions as an early and genuine form of text construction. When children draw, they take their ideas out of their minds and organise them onto paper, freeing up their working memory (LINK). Their illustrations become a stable reference point that they can return to and orally rehearse. They no longer need to hold this information in their mind. Freeing them up to focus on transcription.
Oral rehearsal does similar work at the sentence-level. Children build their sentence(s) aloud before they write them, and can adjust its structure and meaning through teacher and peer feedback (LINK). When it’s time to transcribe, the sentence already exists. They are not searching for content and a sentence structure at the same moment. Working memory is free to focus on transcription.
How our book-making approach develops through the year groups
The examples below show how we can adjust our transcription expectations as children’s writing fluency develops (in earnest). As children’s fluency increases, we can increase the amount of thinking they are to transcribe in one sitting.
LEVEL ONE (Nursery – Reception): A mixture of emergent writing, single words or short phrases on each page
At Nursery and at the start of Reception, most children will use emergent writing or kid writing, as a temporary scaffold, to create their texts. However, once phonics, handwriting and spelling instruction is introduced, they’ll transition quickly onto writing single words or short phrases.
LEVEL TWO (Reception – Year One): A single sentence per page
At level two, a child can be expected to commit to a single sentence to each page of their picturebook (sometimes they’ll just be having such a great day they’ll want to do more). The cognitive demand of transcription is kept low so that a child who is still building their handwriting and spelling automaticity can create a whole text and feel the success and satisfaction that comes with that.
Our expectation is that children in Reception/Year One would learn to craft books like this. By the way, for children new to English, LEVEL ONE or LEVEL TWO is a really great place to start (LINK)
LEVEL THREE (Year One – Year Two): Multiple sentences per page
This is a small step up in transcriptional load. When children are ready, they can be asked to transcribe more of the content they have already settled on through their talk, drawing and oral rehearsals. Often, you’ll know that they’re ready because, despite asking only for a single sentence, they’ll ignore you and want to write multiple sentences on each page anyway! We find this is typical in year one and into year two.
LEVEL FOUR (Year Two – Year Three Onwards): A paragraph per page
At LEVEL FOUR, each page becomes a short paragraph of three or four sentences. This is a substantial increase in transcriptional output. Critically, though, the approach remains reassuringly consistent. The expectation is that children draft a page a day.
Seen side by side, the four levels make the composition-first argument visible. What changes is the transcriptional demand the teacher asks the child to manage in a single sitting. A teacher can move a class, a group, or an individual child between these levels at any time. Adaptive teaching becomes a matter of adjusting children’s transcriptional load, not redesigning the entire writing task!
Transcription becomes a manageable task
Book-making treats transcription as the final stage, made easier by everything that’s come before it.
Once children’s compositions are settled, children’s attention can go towards forming letters, encoding words and using punctuation (LINK).
This is still demanding work! But children are no longer being asked to simultaneously invent content, plan it all in their mind and then transcribe it to paper in one sitting. Our approach creates room for transcription and composition to improve. We see transcriptional fluency increase, feelings of pride and success increase, and final outcomes become longer and more controlled. This is because transcription is no longer competing with composition for the same limited attention.
This is at the heart of the book-making approach. Strong transcription is not the precondition for good composition. It is something composition-first teaching makes possible.
Book-making should not replace explicit transcription teaching.
Book-making sessions work best when they sit alongside regular, explicit and well-taught handwriting and spelling lessons. These lessons need to be timetabled in their own right [LINK].
Handwriting and spelling require their own short, regular, explicit sessions, separate from book-making time, where letter formation, spelling patterns, and orthographic knowledge can be taught directly and practised deliberately. Importantly, what children learn in these sessions does not stay contained within them. Instead, they use and apply all that rich learning straight into their books.
Seen this way, these two kinds of lessons are feeding the same outcome from two directions.
Explicit transcription teaching builds the automaticity and fluency that book-making sessions depend on.
Book-making sessions give the real and motivating context in which children actually want to improve their transcriptional skills!
Writing for a reason changes how children behave as writers
Importantly, book-making doesn’t produce isolated sentences. It produces short but complete texts. Books that can be told, read, shared, revisited and enjoyed by others. That sense of audience and purpose changes how children engage with writing.
Studies of authenticity in children’s writing find that pupils consistently prefer, and invest more effort in, writing that serves a genuine communicative purpose for a real audience beyond the classroom. We know that they pay more attention, put in more effort, persist for longer, show greater enthusiasm, seek support from others rather than give up, write more independently and are less likely to allow themselves to be distracted (LINK, LINK)
They care about whether their meaning comes across. They also start to see themselves as authors, with control over different kinds of texts, rather than as pupils completing an exercise. Writer identity, understood as a pupil’s sense of themselves as someone who is a genuine writer, is also associated with stronger engagement, positive dispositions towards writing and exceptional academic progress (LINK).
This approach isn’t just practice. It is publication. That distinction matters to how seriously children take their own writing.
What this looks like for the teacher
None of this happens by accident. Teachers model how to make a book, from the initial idea to the illustrations. They demonstrate oral rehearsal of sentences, guide children to sequence their pages, and support them as they refine and orally rehearse what they want to transcribe to paper.
This level of quality instruction is what allows children to enter the transcribing stage with confidence rather than uncertainty.
Top tips:
In addition to book-making sessions, deliver short, regular, explicit handwriting and spelling lessons. These should be timetabled in their own right [LINK].
Before transcribing, children should talk, draw and orally rehearse their ideas [LINK, LINK, LINK, LINK and LINK].
Children should be asked to transcribe at whatever level of sentence demand is most appropriate.
After transcribing, children should ‘tell’ or otherwise read back their writing to their teacher or friends. This way, they can check if their meaning was clear and well understood.
To end
By settling composition first, through talk, drawing, and oral rehearsal, you ensure that when children turn their attention to transcription, they are writing language they already own rather than trying to invent and write it at the same time.
It’s this ordering that allows young writers to produce manuscripts that are longer, more controlled, more successful and more genuinely their own. It’s also an awful lot of fun!
“Hi Ross and Phil. We recently received some training where it was recommended that in the EYFS we should only focus on teaching handwriting to ‘mastery’. We shouldn’t look to teach composition until children have mastered handwriting. This doesn’t feel right to us. Can you help?”
The myth
Children should master handwriting before anything else. Teachers should focus exclusively on developing speed and automaticity in letter formation and composition should wait until transcription is secured. Until a child can form letters quickly and correctly, the argument goes, they aren’t really ready to be a writer yet [LINK and LINK].
Why the myth persists
This myth survives because it does actually have a genuine finding at its core.
As our own Writing Development Map shows, handwriting fluency is reliably associated with the quality and quantity of children’s writing
Children who find letter formation effortful spend more of their limited working memory on these lower-level, mechanical processes, leaving fewer cognitive resources for the higher-order work of composition.
Where the myth goes wrong is in the next step: treating a correlation between handwriting fluency and writing quality as a prescription for sequencing: handwriting first, fast and only, then composing. Showing that handwriting contributes to writing quality is not the same as saying it must be mastered in isolation before composition can begin!🤦🏻♂️
What the research actually shows
Writing development is interactive, not hierarchical. Again, as our Writing Development Map shows, transcription, text generation and executive control operate simultaneously during writing, not as a sequence of discrete stages a writer must complete in order. Berninger & Winn (2006) make a similar case: handwriting, spelling and text generation develop reciprocally, each shaping the other as a child grows as a writer. More recent models, including Kim’s (2022) model of writing continues this understanding. Transcription and composition are interacting components of one developing system, not separate stages.
New empirical evidence sharpens this point considerably. Kreutz et al. (2026) identified what they call a ‘double dissociation’ between transcription skills and text quality. In plain terms: around 12% of students produced high-quality texts despite having deficient handwriting fluency or spelling. 12% of pupils showed the reverse, producing poor-quality texts despite having perfectly good transcription skills.
Composition supports transcription development
Genuine, purposeful writing gives children repeated opportunities to retrieve and apply their letter formation and spelling knowledge in context. A whole variety of studies have found meaningful links running in both directions between transcriptional fluency and composing (LINK). Treating handwriting as something to be perfected in isolation, before children are allowed to compose, removes one of the best contexts that helps handwriting develop in the first place.
If working memory capacity is the concern, exclusion isn’t the answer, scaffolding is.
McCutchen’s (1996) capacity theory of writing is often cited (wrongly) to argue that children’s limited working memory can’t cope with transcription and composition at once. But this research points towards scaffolding, not exclusion. For example, inviting children to use ‘kid writing’ as a temporary scaffold while they continue to develop their transcriptional skills (in earnest).
This scaffold exists precisely because researchers have taken the capacity problem seriously and concluded that supporting children’s access to composition, not postponing it, is the right response.
Young children are already composers
Long before their handwriting is fluent, young children are capable of real composition. Through their own independent attempts, they engage in authentic meaning-making well ahead of transcriptional mastery (LINK).
Research evidence into emergent writing is unambiguous on this point. Classroom research shows the youngest of writers can naturally weave together drawing, talking and writing as they make meaning. Composing is already well underway before they even start formal schooling (LINK).
For example, Rowe’s (2018) review of early writing research shows that children’s compositional intent (their drive to communicate something specific) is observable far earlier than their transcriptional control and that early-years pedagogy has historically undersold what young children are capable of!
Delaying composition until handwriting is automatic risks denying children, for months or even years, the chance to develop as authors with something to say.
The cost of getting it wrong
Sequencing instruction this way teaches children something about what kind of writer they’re allowed to be (LINK).
Writing motivation depends on children experiencing genuine autonomy and competence in what they’re doing. A child whose early writing instruction consists only of copying letters is being told, in effect, that composing (having something to say and getting to say it) isn’t yet their job. As a result, children can often feel as though they are being asked to prepare for something that never actually comes…
Graham’s (2018) writer(s)-within-community model goes further, framing writing development as something that happens through genuine participation in writing communities. Children become writers by doing the social, communicative work of writing, not by rehearsing its mechanics in isolation. Strip composition out of the early curriculum for long enough and you risk manufacturing precisely the kind of disengagement the National Literacy Trust’s 2026 report describes in its profiles of ambivalent and averse writers: children who come to the experience writing as a technical chore rather than something they do for their own purposes.
What should schools do?
Fortunately, the research doesn’t force a choice between handwriting and composition. Effective practice attends to both, simultaneously, from the start:
Teach handwriting explicitly and systematically from Reception onwards [LINK].
Prioritise accurate, increasingly automatic letter formation.
Teach encoding/spelling lessons not just handwriting lessons [LINK].
Provide daily, genuine opportunities for composition from the earliest years [LINK].
Use emergent writing, kid writing and informed spelling as temporary scaffolds to support children whose transcription is still being developed (in earnest) [LINK].
Gradually increase compositional demands as transcription becomes more automatic, rather than withholding it completely [LINK].
The bottom line
Research strongly supports the explicit teaching of handwriting. Research strongly supports the teaching of composition from a child’s earliest encounters with writing. What the research does not support is teaching handwriting first, fast and only.
Handwriting and composition develop reciprocally: children become more fluent handwriters partly through composing, and they become more capable composers as their handwriting develops.
Teaching children to write means teaching them to be writers not scribers…
References and further reading
Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Graham, S., & Richards, T. (2002). Writing and reading: Connections between language by hand and language by eye. Journal of Learning Disabilities, 35(1), 39–56.
Berninger, V. W., Abbott, R. D., Jones, J., Wolf, B. J., Gould, L., Anderson-Youngstrom, M., Shimada, S., & Apel, K. (2006). Early development of language by hand: Composing, reading, listening, and speaking connections, three letter-writing modes, and fast mapping in spelling. Developmental Neuropsychology, 29(1), 61–92.
Berninger, V. W., Vaughan, K., Abbott, R. D., Abbott, S. P., Rogan, L. W., Brooks, A., Reed, E., & Graham, S. (1997). Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers: Transfer from handwriting to composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 89(4), 652–666.
Berninger, V. W., & Winn, W. D. (2006). Implications of advancements in brain research and technology for writing development, writing instruction, and educational evolution. In C. MacArthur, S. Graham, & J. Fitzgerald (Eds.), Handbook of Writing Research (pp. 96–114). Guilford Press.
Bissex, G. L. (1980). GNYS AT WRK: A child learns to write and read. Harvard University Press.
Bonafede, A., & Clark, C. (2026). Why children and young people do or do not engage with writing in their free time: Towards a multidimensional model of writing engagement. National Literacy Trust.
Cabell, S. Q., Neuman, S. B., & Terry, N. P. (2023). Handbook on the science of early literacy. Guilford Press
Clay, M. M. (1975). What Did I Write? Heinemann.
Clay, M. (1987). Writing Begins at Home: Preparing Children for Writing before They Go to School. Heinemann.
Clay, M. M. (2010). How very young children explore writing. Heinemann.
Dyson, A. H. (1989). Multiple Worlds of Child Writers. Teachers College Press.
Dyson, A. H. (1993). Social Worlds of Children Learning to Write in an Urban Primary School. Teachers College Press.
Feldgus, E. G., Cardonick, I., & Gentry, J. R. (2017). Kid Writing: A Systematic Approach to Phonics, Journals, and Writing Workshop. Wright Group/McGraw-Hill.
Graham, S. (2018). A revised writer(s)-within-community model of writing. Educational Psychologist, 53(4), 258–279.
Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Fink, B. (2000). Is handwriting causally related to learning to write? Treatment of handwriting problems in beginning writers. Journal of Educational Psychology, 92(4), 620–633.
Håland, A., Hoem, T. F., & McTigue, E. M. (2019). Writing in first grade: The quantity and quality of practices in Norwegian classrooms. Early childhood education journal, 47(1), 63-74.
Hayes, J. R. (1996). A new framework for understanding cognition and affect in writing. In C. M. Levy & S. Ransdell (Eds.), The Science of Writing: Theories, Methods, Individual Differences, and Applications (pp. 1–27). Lawrence Erlbaum Associates.
Kim, Y. S. G., & Graham, S. (2022). Expanding the Direct and Indirect Effects Model of Writing (DIEW): Reading–writing relations, and dynamic relations as a function of measurement/dimensions of written composition. Journal of Educational Psychology, 114(2), 215.
Kreutz, R. M., Philippek, J., Hennes, A. K., & Schabmann, A. (2026). Good text quality despite deficient transcription skills: An analysis of double dissociation. Journal of Writing Research.
Mackenzie, N. M., & Scull, J. (2024). Understanding and supporting young writers from birth to 8. Taylor & Francis.
McCutchen, D. (1996). A capacity theory of writing: Working memory in composition. Educational Psychology Review, 8(3), 299–325.
Medwell, J., & Wray, D. (2007). Handwriting: What do we know and what do we need to know? Literacy, 41(1), 10–16.
Medwell, J., Strand, S., & Wray, D. (2007). The role of handwriting in composing for Y2 children. Literacy, 41(1), 18–36.
Medwell, J., Strand, S., & Wray, D. (2009). The links between handwriting and composing for Y6 children. Cambridge Journal of Education, 39(3), 329–344.
Quinn, M. F., & Rohloff, R. (2025). Understanding young children’s composition across three key components: Transcription, connection, and discourse. Journal of Research in Childhood Education, 39(1), 42-60.
Quinn, M. F., Zhang, X. Y., Rohloff, R., & Ridley, J. (2026). Understanding preschool writing: task adherence as a window into composing development. Reading and Writing, 1-23.
Ray, K. W., & Glover, M. (2008). Already Ready: Nurturing Writers in Preschool and Kindergarten. Heinemann.
Rowe, D. W. (2018). The unrealized promise of emergent writing: Reimagining the way forward for early writing instruction. Language Arts, 95(4), 229–241.
Santangelo, T., & Graham, S. (2016). A comprehensive meta-analysis of handwriting instruction. Educational Psychology Review, 28, 225–265.
Schickedanz, J. A. (1990). Adam’s righting revolutions: One child’s literacy development from infancy through grade one. Heinemann Educational Publishers.
There is a moment that happens in many Nursery and Reception classrooms that looks, on the surface, quite simple: you sit down and you write. You pick up a pen and the children watch with curiosity, anticipation and intrigue.
What is happening in that moment is far from simple.
When you write and make picturebooks in front of your children (daily and with genuine pleasure), they are receiving one of the richest educational experiences available to them. As they watch and listen, across dozens of domains of knowledge, understanding, skill, and disposition, they are learning an extraordinary amount.
This article sets out the full scope of what that learning looks like. It helps us see just how much is made available to children when we choose to write in front of our classes. The categories that follow make the case that daily writing lessons are not a nice extra. They are one of the most powerful pedagogical acts in the early years classroom.
As you read through it, you may find yourself thinking: I just didn’t know I was teaching them all of that!
✏️ Writing behaviours and habits
When children gather together to watch you write daily, they absorb a model of what being a writer is all about. This ‘writing business’ is something that people who come to Nursery/Reception do for pleasure. Children will begin to understand the routines and rituals of a writing life.
Writers write daily.
Writing and making books is enjoyable.
Writing and making books takes time.
Writers return to unfinished books.
Writers can write in short sessions.
Writing is often a process, not always a single event.
Writers develop routines, habits and rituals.
Writers have book ideas inside them.
Writers notice things worth making books about.
Writers choose to write even when they are unsure.
Writers keep going when writing gets difficult.
Writers make mistakes.
Writers change their minds.
Writers revise their pictures and their writing.
Writers proof-read.
Writers reread what they’ve written.
Writers seek feedback and reactions from their friends and family.
Writers get better by learning from other writers and through practice.
Writers celebrate their published books.
🧑🎨 Writer identity
Perhaps the most transformative learning children can take from watching their teacher write is the understanding that they can be writers too. Writer-identity is caught, not taught. A teacher who genuinely inhabits a writer’s identity in front of their class each day gives children permission to be writers too.
Adults are writers and book makers.
Teachers are writers and book makers (my teacher was once a child who made books)
Children are writers and book makers!
Anyone can make story books and information books.
Story books belong to everyone.
Their own ideas matter.
Their experiences and their funds of knowledge are worth turning into books.
Their voices and creative ideas have value and can bring people immense pleasure.
Writing and book making is a great way to express yourself.
💡 Generating ideas
One of the most exciting aspects of writing with young children is where their ideas come from. Watching their teacher wonder aloud, make connections and gather material from their world demystifies the creative process for young children.
Stories come from your imagination.
Stories come from your memories.
Stories come from conversations with friends.
Stories come from playing.
Everyday experiences are worth writing down.
Writers collect ideas.
Writers observe closely.
Writers wonder about things.
Writers ask questions.
Writers want to teach people about the things they care about most.
When a teacher says a word, phrase or sentence aloud before writing it down, children are receiving a live demonstration of the relationship between spoken and written language. This is some of the most direct language teaching available in the early years.
Writers say words, phrases and sentences aloud before they write them down.
Writers talk through their ideas with their friends before committing them to paper.
Writers choose words carefully.
Different words create different reactions in your readers.
Writers use descriptive language.
Writers use precise language.
Writers use repetition.
Writers use rhythm.
Writers use sound patterns.
Writers use humour.
Writers create suspense.
Writers use dialogue.
Writers use questions.
Writers use exclamations.
Language can create emotions in your reader.
📖 Concepts about print
To help children read and write, they need to develop an understanding of how print works. A teacher who writes their own books in front of their class provides repeated, meaningful exposure to all of these print concepts in context.
Print carries meaning.
Words are separate units of meaning.
Sentences are made of words.
Text has directionality. English print runs left to right. Print runs top to bottom.
Spaces separate words.
Pages are turned in sequence to reveal something new to the reader.
Writing, drawing and colouring strengthens the small muscles in your hands and fingers.
Holding and controlling a pencil takes practice.
Writers are developing their hand-eye coordination.
Writers and illustrators learn to apply different amounts of pressure to their pencils.
Your posture affects your writing and drawing.
Writers learn how to position their paper effectively.
Both hands often work together during book making.
👂 Phonological awareness
Teachers who think aloud about the sounds they are putting to paper (stretching phonemes, segmenting words, noticing rhymes and patterns) are providing powerful phonological instruction embedded in a meaningful, purposeful context.
Writing down sounds requires concentration and practice. If you do it a lot, you don’t have to even think about it.
🔡 Spelling
Spelling can feel abstract and remote to young children when presented as a discrete skill. When a teacher puzzles over a spelling in front of the class (using phonics, drawing on other known words, checking the word wall) spelling becomes a visible, manageable problem-solving activity.
Writers use known words to help with unknown words.
Some words are irregular and need to be remembered.
Writers use resources to help them spell.
📝 Sentence construction
Children who have not yet internalised what a sentence is can begin to absorb that understanding simply by watching a teacher make sentences every day. They’ll see their teacher deciding where to start, where to end and how different punctuation marks are used.?!
Sentences express ideas. One after another.
Sentences can be short or long.
Writers use capital letters.
Writers use end punctuation (full stops, question marks, exclamation marks).
Writers reread their writing all the time to make sure it reads well for their audience.
📚 Composition
The large-scale decisions about what a text will contain is usually invisible to children who only ever read finished books. A teacher composing in front of their class makes those decisions audible, showing children how writers build meaning across a whole text.
Writers share facts and explain things to their readers to help them learn new things.
🎭 Narrative understanding
Stories are not arbitrary sequences of events. They are shaped by the logic of human experience (characters who want things, face things, and change). Children who watch a teacher build a story begin to absorb this logic deeply [LINK, LINK].
Images can tell part of the story or explain something really well.
Covers attract readers.
Titles are chosen.
Endpapers exist.
Size and format affect reading.
White space matters.
Text placement matters.
🎨 Artistic understanding
When a teacher illustrates their picturebook, the classroom becomes a studio. Children begin to understand that visual art is not decorative but communicative. The choices an illustrator makes are intentional, revisable and meaningful.
Illustrations can show emotions.
Colour creates mood.
Scale influences meaning.
Details can support the text.
Pictures can show information not stated in text.
Images can create humour.
Images can create tension.
Contrasts between text and pictures are possible.
🧠 Metacognition
When a teacher thinks aloud while writing (noticing what is and isn’t working, articulating reasons for choices, revisiting decisions) they are modelling one of the most transferable cognitive skills children can develop: thinking about their thinking.
Writers think about their writing.
Writers monitor possible misunderstandings.
Writers reread and reflect.
Writers make changes.
Writers learn from previous experiences.
⚙️ Executive function
Writing is one of the most demanding executive-function tasks that humans regularly perform. Watching a skilled writer manage their attention and focus, and push through difficulties gives children a visible model of how these cognitive processes work.
Sustained attention and focus really matters.
Self-control supports writing.
Book-making can be broken down into small manageable parts.
Improvement is possible with time and hard work.
Expertise develops over time.
Practice matters.
Learning to write never ends.
Confidence grows through repeated experience.
Writing something of quality needs time.
✨ Creativity
When a teacher takes a creative risk (tries an unexpected idea, combines things in a new way, laughs at a strange image that works) children see that creativity is not a gift some people have and others don’t. They can take creative risks too.
Writing can be emotional. It involves vulnerability, frustration, pride, and the particular satisfaction of finishing something you’ve made. When a teacher brings genuine emotions to their writing, and names those emotions, they give children a richer vocabulary for their own lives and texts.
Feelings can be expressed through stories.
Sharing stories can help us make sense of our experiences.
Frustration is normal.
Pride accompanies achievement.
Persistence leads to feelings of satisfaction.
Imperfection happens.
Feedback from your friends and teacher can make you feel amazing.
Sharing your book with others to see their reactions can be so rewarding and can become addictive!
Writing communities create their own writing culture.
Other people can influence our book making.
Books are made for readers. Books are made to be read and performed. Books are olive branches that allow us to make and share meaning with others. Books bring people together.
Children who understand that books go through stages have a more accurate and empowering model of what making a book involves.
Books go through stages.
Drafts precede final versions.
Authors revise.
Editors exist.
Books reach audiences.
Authors receive responses from their fans.
Books circulate within communities.
🌍 Cultural understanding
Stories carry cultures. When a teacher writes stories that reflect diverse experiences and voices, and invites children’s own stories into the classroom, they communicate something fundamental about whose knowledge and whose life is worth writing about [LINK and LINK].
Stories and information texts reflect cultures.
Stories and information texts preserve traditions.
🔢 Scientific and mathematical concepts embedded in bookmaking
The making of a picturebook is, among other things, an exercise in applied mathematics and scientific thinking.
Sequencing.
Pattern recognition.
Classification.
Comparison.
Measurement.
Spatial relationships.
Position and direction.
Cause and effect.
Prediction.
Observation.
Recording information.
Counting pages.
Ordering events.
Estimating space.
Symmetry and shape.
Size relationships.
The biggest learning of all
At the heart of all of this is something simpler and more important than any of the individual categories above. When a Nursery or Reception teacher sits down and writes in front of their class (daily, purposefully, and with genuine engagement) children learn something that no worksheet or workbook can teach them:
Books are not mysterious objects created elsewhere by unknown experts. They are made by ordinary people through thought, talk, drawing, revision, persistence and joy. I can be an author and illustrator too.
Make picturebooks. The bookmaking approach is the most developmentally appropriate writing process for the youngest of writers [LINK].
Invite children into the process. Ask for ideas, take suggestions, read back and ask if it sounds right. Writing in front of children should be a social act [LINK].
Talk about being a writer, not just about writing. Use identity language: we’re writers in this class.
Connect your writing to your reading. Show children mentor texts. Name the authors you are learning from. Show children that reading feeds writing [LINK].
Celebrate finished work. Share the books you make with your class. Let children see that their teacher’s writing reaches an audience and matters.
Remember what you are teaching. On any given day, when you sit down and write in front of your class, you may be teaching a writerly habit, a planning technique, an encoding strategy or a craft move. Focus on modelling just one thing [LINK].
Ask children to book-make too. Immediately after modelling your bit of writing, ask children to go and work on their picturebook too. Make sure children have a daily time to write [LINK].
On the 17th of June 2026, the National Literacy Trust published a report entitled ‘Why Children and Young People Do or Do Not Engage with Writing in Their Free Time’ [LINK].
The mission of The Writing For Pleasure Centre is to help all young people become passionate and successful writers. As a think tank for exploring what world-class writing is and could be, a crucial part of our work is analysing emerging research and reports.
The NLT’s report makes for sobering reading. Drawing on written responses from 55,075 children and young people aged 8-18, Why Children and Young People Do or Do Not Engage with Writing in Their Free Time sets out to understand, in young writers’ own words, why so many of them are switching off from writing.
The headline numbers are pretty stark:
Writing enjoyment in free time has almost halved in fifteen years.
At the end of KS2 in England, 28% of pupils did not meet the expected standard in writing, rising to 41% among disadvantaged pupils.
What makes this report especially enlightening is its method. Rather than asking whether children and young people enjoy writing, the NLT has asked why, and even built a model of writing engagement directly from what the students said.
The research team identified three types of volitional writers: keen writers,ambivalent writers and averse writers. From the themes that emerged, they built a model organised around four interacting domains:
Behavioural. These are the writerly habits and routines children establish.
Affective. This is the emotional feelings that can come with writing: enjoyment, anxiety, pride, frustration, identity.
Cognitive. The thinking that’s involved in writing. From generating ideas to remembering the mechanics of spelling and handwriting.
Social. The people, audiences and contexts that influence a child’s writerly life.
Just as we point out in our book Engaging Writing Teaching [LINK], the NLT’s report insists that these domains aren’t separate entities. A pupil who feels emotionally connected to their writing (affective engagement) is more likely to sustain effort (behavioural engagement) and think deeply about possible improvements (cognitive engagement). Likewise, a sense of belonging within a writing community (social engagement) can amplify confidence, motivation and persistence.
Understanding engagement through this multidimensional lens helps us, as teachers, see writing not as a solitary act but as a complex blend of doing, feeling, thinking and relating to others. It reminds us that when pupils disengage from free-time writing it is not a matter of laziness or indifference but perhaps a signal that one or more of these dimensions is missing or is underdeveloped.
What do we know about these keen, ambivalent and averse writers?
The NLT’s three groups aren’t neatly separate types of child so much as three points on a continuum, and the report is careful to stress that children move along it.
Keen writers describe writing as being an extension of their identity, creativity and emotions. Autonomy is central here. The majority of this group said being supported to choose what they write about, and what style they want to write it in, motivates them. As one student put it, ‘Writing makes me feel at home and brings me closer to myself.’ Notably, girls, younger children, and pupils receiving free school meals were all overrepresented in the keen writers group.
Ambivalent writers are the largest and most volatile group. Their relationship with writing can fluctuate: enjoyable when they have chosen a topic that aligns with their interests or when there is a real audience, but easily disrupted by fragile confidence, the effort writing demands, or the competing pressures on their time. The report identifies a recurring tension in this group between strong cognitive and creative interest in writing and a frustration in their inability to sustain it once their writing project starts to feel effortful. This appears to be particularly the case when it comes to things like spelling, handwriting and translating their ideas into text.
Averse writers show the deepest disengagement. Averse writers are more likely to be older pupils and boys (44% of boys identified as averse, compared with 27% of girls). For this group, writing is basically associated with school-based obligation and compliance, and, as a result, is very rarely self-initiated. Negative experiences with school-based writing tasks come up repeatedly as the point at which any residual enjoyment from writing was extinguished.
Where these findings meet what we already know
For readers familiar with our Writing For Pleasure approach, several threads in this report will land as strong corroboration rather than new information.
Keen writers understand the purposes for writing in ways their peers perhaps don’t. To develop a class of keen writers is to help them realise that writing allows us to make and share meaning. These are meanings we are eager to commit to paper and share with others. When we support children to choose their own writing ideas within the parameters of a class writing project, we help them choose something they are keen to write about. When they are keen on their topic, they are keen to learn how they can write about it well. When we explicitly teach children how to generate and choose their own writing ideas for class writing projects, we are also giving them the skills to do this in their free-time writing too.
A lack of writing fluency is doing major damage. The cognitive domain findings among ambivalent and averse writers repeatedly describe spelling, handwriting and translating ideas into text as feeling incredibly effortful. This is precisely the dynamic captured in our Writing Map development model, in which developing children’s writing fluency is seen as an instructional priority. Without such fluency, strain at the transcription level makes writing feel effortful (even painful) and draws cognitive resources away from the important work of composing something really great. The NLT’s qualitative data gives this aspect of our writing model a human voice.
Real audiences for children’s volitional writing aren’t extras. Across all three groups, the presence of genuine and supportive audiences was seen as essential. For averse writers, the absence of real audiences renders their writing as ‘purposeless’. For the keen writers, real audiences and pursuing their own authentic purposes were described as actively sustaining their motivation to write. This squares closely with our principles that children need to write for real reasons and real readers, not solely for a teacher-evaluation [see this LINK for ideas on how you can bring real audiences to children’s free-time writing].
Poorly designed school writing practices are undermining pupils’ free-time writing engagement. Perhaps the most uncomfortable finding for policymakers is how frequently children, especially older, averse writers, trace their disengagement directly to the controlling, compliance-based and assessment-heavy writing practices used in their schools.
Being economically underserved doesn’t predict disengagement. Children receiving free school meals are more represented among keen writers than their peers, not less. This contradicts any lazy narratives that try to link socioeconomic disadvantage to writing aversion (These kids haven’t got any experiences – they haven’t got anything to write about…) [LINK for more on this].
What this means for classroom practice
Teach for authorial agency. Explicitly teach children idea generation strategies during your class writing projects so that they can use them in their free time writing too [LINK and LINK to learn about these strategies].
Give their volitional writing somewhere to go. Audiences beyond the teacher (peers, younger pupils, families, school publications, online platforms, people beyond the classroom) consistently appear where engagement is highest, and their absence where it’s lowest.
Check children’s writing fluency. Where handwriting, spelling and writing fluency are adding cognitive load, address them quickly through explicit teaching, assessment and intervention [LINK for more details on this].
For more, consider purchasing our eBook Engaging Writing Teaching. Remember, all our books and resources are free for members. To become a member, sign up here.
Hi everyone! Really looking forward to our professional development/learning course for primary school teachers and school leaders, starting next week! 😊
Drawing upon contemporary research, Professor Sarah McGeown and I will provide clear research-informed practices to support children’s reading and writing acquisition and development throughout primary school, focusing on both the skill and will in literacy learning, enjoyment and engagement.
Come join us! We’d love to see you. Alternatively, maybe do us a little favor and share these details with friends and colleagues. To learn more, and to register, follow this LINK.
Improving children’s reading AND writing: Connecting research and practice
Five online sessions focusing on children’s reading and writing will take place across April-June from 4pm – 5pm. These sessions are designed for UK primary school teachers, primary school leaders, literacy leads and education consultants.
The sessions are designed to provide research insights to support children’s reading and writing acquisition and development. With a focus on supporting both reading and writing skill, all those attending will have greater access and insight into contemporary research to inform their classroom practice.
Participants will gain insight into implications for practice, a curated collection of key open access research articles and, if all sessions are attended, a certificate of completion.
Sessions can be booked individually for £15 each or all four sessions can be booked at a discounted price of £50.
Sessions overview
Free webinar:
Supporting reading for pleasure in primary schools: Examining the evidence and children’s perspectives – Tuesday 14 April, 16:00- 17:00pm
Delivered by Professor Sarah McGeown
Supporting children to reading for pleasure is a key priority in this National Year of Reading, but which ‘reading for pleasure’ practices work? This session will explore common practices, from independent reading and teacher read-aloud, to book-talk, reading diaries, annual celebrations, and the use of rewards. It will examine the research evidence, and children’s perspectives of these practices, to provide teachers with useful insights to support their classroom practice.
Four paid online sessions:
Session 1: Learning to read – Thursday 30 April 2026, 16:00-17:00pm
Delivered by Professor Sarah McGeown
This session highlights the core skills underpinning reading development, research-informed practice to support children’s word reading, and the importance of nurturing an early love and interest in books, words, and stories.
Session 2: Reading motivation and engagement – Thursday 14 May 2026, 16:00-17:00pm
Delivered by Professor Sarah McGeown
This session provides insight into the importance of reading motivation and engagement throughout primary school, research-informed principles to support reading engagement, and the reading, language, social and emotional benefits accrued from reading.
Session 3: Learning to write – Monday 1 June 2026, 16:00-17:00pm
Delivered by Ross Young
This session explores key aspects of writing development, research-informed strategies to support children as apprentice writers, and the importance of nurturing a lifelong love of writing.
Session 4: Writing motivation and engagement – Monday 22 June 2026, 16:00-17:00pm
Delivered by Ross Young
This session provides insight into the importance of writing motivation and engagement throughout primary school, research-informed principles to support children’s engagement with writing, and the social, emotional, and expressive benefits gained through the experience of being a young writer.
Biographies
Professor Sarah McGeown is Director of the University of Edinburgh’s Literacy Lab. She has published widely in academic and professional journals, with research focusing on early reading acquisition and development to motivation and engagement in reading. She is an advocate for research-practice partners and closing the gap between research and practice to improve children’s reading experiences and outcomes.
Ross Young is a former primary school teacher and co-founder of The Writing for Pleasure Centre. His work focuses on translating writing research into effective classroom practice, and he regularly collaborates with teachers and children in schools. He has written several books on teaching writing and leads professional development through organisations such as the UKLA. Ross is currently a PhD researcher at the University of Edinburgh’s Literacy Lab, studying children’s writing lives in partnership with the National Literacy Trust.
In Engaging Writing Teaching, writer-teachers Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson explore what it means for children to be truly engaged as writers.
From the authors of The Science of Teaching Primary Writing and Writing for Pleasure, this new title offers an actionable framework for developing writing engagement in schools based on five key drivers:
Behavioural engagement: Will I participate actively? Will I put in effort, stay focused, and persist when things get difficult?
Affective engagement: How do I feel about writing? Am I curious, interested, and emotionally invested enough in what I’m writing?
Cognitive engagement: How much will I think about this? Am I willing to generate great ideas, plan carefully, reflect critically and make thoughtful revisions and edits?
Social engagement: How am I connecting with others through this writing? Am I collaborating, sharing ideas and responding to feedback as part of a community of writers?
Academic engagement: How committed am I to mastering the skills outlined in the curriculum? Am I applying effort, strategy, and persistence to improve my academic competence?
This inspiring and practical book will help you create a writing classroom where every child feels connected, capable, and compelled to write, not because they have to but because they want to.
The goal of this article is to reorientate our understanding of why transcription matters: shifting it away from compliance and correction, and towards a reader-centred, meaning-making approach in which transcription supports effective communication. It also seeks to hold transcription and composition together, rather than privileging one over the other, and to validate emergent writing as a legitimate starting point.
Teachers care about transcription. Walk into any primary classroom and you will find children receiving explicit handwriting and spelling lessons. You’ll see them being reminded to form their letters correctly, to check their spellings and to use capital letters at the start of sentences. Transcription is taught. It is practised. It is marked.
What we may have forgotten though is why it matters.
The DfE’s Writing Framework (2025) puts the problem plainly:
“Too often, pupils learn to write for the circular purpose of learning to write.”
Round and round we go and somewhere along the line we forget the point of it all. We teach about transcription because it’s on the curriculum. We make it a priority because we know Ofsted will like it. We lose sight of the only reason it actually matters: so that the readers of our children’s texts can understand them and enjoy them.
“Let us be clear. If children do not learn and internalise the essential transcriptional skills involved in crafting writing (spelling, handwriting, and punctuation), then their attempts to share meaning with others may be compromised or even fruitless.”
— Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson
This shift in orientation, from transcription as compliance to transcription as communication, changes everything about how we teach it.
The Real Purpose Of Getting It Right
In our Writing Development Map (2025a), we define writing as being the construction of a text to share meaning. That word, share, is doing important work. Writing is an attempt to move and share something from one person to another. Transcription is the mechanism that makes that transfer possible.
Young writers have extraordinary things to say. The tragedy is that when transcription breaks down, those things become inaccessible. It breaks your heart. A reader who has to wrestle with a text (trying desperately to decode wild spelling attempts or else left squinting at the handwriting) loses the thread and is slowly disconnected from the writer and their meaning. That must be depressing. Their voice gets lost in the chaos.
This is the perspective we should be taking when we teach transcription.
Not “your letters need to sit on the line” as the rule handed down from on high, but “I really want your readers to be able to enjoy the bit about the dragon!”
Not “you’ve forgotten your full stops” simply as a correction, but “I want your readers to know when they can stop and talk about your amazing writing before they eagerly read your next thought.”
Not: “Check all the spellings I’ve underlined.” But: “Let’s make sure these words are spelt conventionally so your reader knows exactly what you mean.”
You see the difference?
We don’t need more attention on transcription. We need better-directed attention (Young & Ferguson 2025a, 2025b, 2026a, 2026b). We know children should:
Receive explicit handwriting and spelling lessons.
Engage in plenty of meaningful writing experiences so that they can use and apply what they learn.
Receive feedback on their handwriting and spelling attempts.
Children’s transcriptional development should always be in the service of helping them make and share meaning. It’s always in the name of the reader.
The Motivational Case For Teaching Transcription Well
This is where motivation becomes not a parallel concern but a directly relevant one. Young & Ferguson (2024) note that the word motive derives from Latin meaning to move. As teachers, we need to help children see the value and purpose of writing so that they are genuinely moved to do it (and to do it to the very best of their abilities). When children understand that transcription serves their readership, effort in transcription becomes purposeful rather than merely about obedience. They are not spelling carefully out of fear of punishment or the dreaded red pen. They are spelling carefully because they want their writing (that they really care about) to stand up and be fully understood.
Research on writing motivation in primary-age children makes clear that early experiences with writing can predispose children to seek it out or avoid it altogether (Young & Ferguson 2024). A systematic review of students’ writing motivation found that authentic writing projects and a loving and supportive classroom environment are among the most powerful conditions for developing lasting motivation to write (Alves Wold et al., 2024). Feedback that connects transcriptional effort to a communicative outcome, such as “Because your spellings were so easy to understand; I could concentrate on performing it to everyone in a really entertaining way. I think they really loved it. Don’t you think so?” is precisely that kind of motivational condition. It feels different because children see it as true.
The Cognitive Case For Teaching Transcription Well
The research on why transcription matters is unambiguous. Handwriting and spelling are foundational ingredients of early writing development, not peripheral concerns (Young & Ferguson, 2023). When transcription is effortful (when a child must consciously attend to how to form every letter or how to spell every word), it crowds out cognitive resources that could be much better spent generating great ideas, selecting precise language and organising their thoughts (Young & Ferguson, 2023).
However, none of this means children are not already writers before their transcription is fully secure. Emergent writing (marks, letter-like shapes and informed spellings) are the developmental foundation for later conventional transcription (Young & Ferguson, 2025c). Emergent writing acts as a temporary scaffold, until children get their transcription skills fully up and running. Children who are allowed to use their emergent writing are already writers (Ray & Glover, 2008; Young & Ferguson, 2022). And as their transcription becomes ever more fluent and automatic, their emergent writing disappears.
“Children want to write. They want to write the first day they attend school. The child’s marks say, ‘I am’.
‘No you aren’t,’ say most school approaches to the teaching of writing.
We take control away from children and place unnecessary road blocks in the way. Then we say, ‘They don’t want to write. How can we motivate them?’”
— Donald Graves
The use of emergent writing and especially ‘kid writing’ is the ultimate leveler. It removes the ‘road blocks’ that Donald Graves is talking about. This way, everyone can be a writer from their very first day in Nursery (Young & Ferguson, 2022).
Holding Both Things At Once
The DfE’s Writing Framework (2025) offers a statement that deserves to be on every staffroom wall:
“Transcription is not writing.”
Our Writing Development Map makes the same point. We must care deeply about transcription but we must never mistake it for the whole thing.
Figure 1. The Writing Map (Young & Ferguson, 2025a). Simplified version reproduced for commentary purposes. Full version available [HERE].
Kim et al. (2021) conducted a meta-analysis of 24 studies and found that instruction focused solely on transcription skills (spelling and handwriting) did not yield statistically significant effects on children’s writing quality or productivity. By contrast, multi-component instructional approaches, which teach transcription alongside composition strategies, produced large and consistent improvements across all measured dimensions, including quality, productivity, and text structure. Harris et al. (2023) tested this experimentally with pupils from economically underserved areas. Integrated instruction outperformed a business-as-usual approach across major measures, including writing quality, planning, and spelling. The researchers concluded that young children can (and should) learn about transcription and composition simultaneously. Transcription, taught well, and in the right spirit, lifts everything.
Children arrive at school already knowing their marks mean something. Children are incredibly motivated to learn more about transcription because they want to be heard and understood. Our job is to make that happen.
Every time we sit down to teach transcription, let’s ask: whose needs are we focusing on right now? The answer should always be the same. Theirs, and the lucky people who get to read what they have to share.
Alves-Wold, A., Walgermo, B. R., McTigue, E., & Uppstad, P. H. (2024). The ABCs of writing motivation: A systematic review of factors emerging from K–5 students’ self-reports as influencing their motivation to write. In Frontiers in Education (Vol. 9, p. 1396484). Frontiers Media SA.
Department for Education. (2025). The writing framework.
Graves, D. H. (1983). Writing: Teachers and children at work. Heinemann.
Harris, K.R., Kim, Y-S.G., Yim, S., Camping, A. & Graham, S. (2023). Yes, they can: Developing transcription and compositional skills together to help children write informative essays at grades 1 and 2. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 72, 102131.
Kim, Y-S.G., Yang, D., Reyes, M. & Connor, C. (2021). Multicomponent writing instruction appears to yield better results. Educational Research Review, 34, 100401.
Ray, K. W., & Glover, M. (2008). Already ready. NH: Heinemann.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2022). Getting children up and running as writers: Lessons for EYFS-KS1 teachers. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2023). The science of teaching primary writing. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2024). Motivating writing teaching. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2025a). Visualising the science of writing: The writing map explained. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2025b). Underwriting: Should teachers do it? The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2025c). Debunking edu-myths: ‘Emergent writing’ isn’t necessary before teaching children to writeThe Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2026a). Spelling and handwriting provision: A checklist. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Young, R., & Ferguson, F. (2026b). Debunking edu-myths: Children should only write words they can spell. The Writing for Pleasure Centre.
Executive Summary: The Writing Early Learning Goal (DfE, 2024) erroneously focuses solely on the mechanics of transcription (letter formation and phonetic spelling). It does not assess composition, oral language, executive function or purpose and audience. It is therefore not a measure of early writing.
The evidence is unambiguous. A meta-analysis (Kim et al., 2021) found that instruction focused solely on transcription has no significant effect on children’s writing quality. The ELG does not just fail to capture what writing is, it channels schools towards approaches that demonstrably fail to develop it.
The DfE’s own Writing Framework (2025) states explicitly: ‘transcription is not writing’. The ELG assesses children solely on transcription. The DfE defines writing one way and is now measuring it in another. This is a structural contradiction that will have dire consequences.
Children who meet the ELG without ever being required to compose something independently will arrive at Key Stage 1 grossly underprepared for its demands. National data will also overstate children’s writing capabilities.
This briefing calls for the immediate commissioning of an evidence-led review to realign the ELG with the DfE’s own stated model of writing development.
1. What The ELG Measures And What It Misses
The Writing ELG is assessed against three criteria:
writing recognisable letters, most of which are correctly formed.
spelling words by identifying sounds in them.
writing simple phrases and sentences that can be read by others.
Each criterion concerns the mechanics of putting marks on a page. None of them asks whether the child has anything to say. None asks whether they have a reason to write, a sense of a reader, a capacity to plan or revise, or a growing identity as a writer. Recent accompanying guidance makes this explicit: children ‘do not need to compose independently’ to meet the ELG, and dictated sentences (in which the teacher speaks and the child transcribes) are described as valid assessment tools (DfE, 2026).
The international research on writing development is often organised around a clear model The Simple View of Writing which identifies three components that must all develop, and must be developed together, for a child to become a writer (Berninger & Winn, 2006; Young & Ferguson, 2025). However, the ELG only addresses one of these three:
Generating ideas, communicating with intent, writing for a reader
Entirely absent
The ELG, as it is currently presented, is not a measure of writing. The ELG can be met by a child who isn’t required to compose a sentence of their own. This is surely one of the lowest educational expectations you can have of a child. That child is not a writer in any sense of the word.
The DfE’s own Writing Framework (2025) recognises this, stating directly: ‘transcription is not writing’. The ELG ignores its own department’s definition.
2. The Evidence: Transcription Alone Does Not Produce Writing
The ELG’s implicit model is sequential: master transcription first and learn to compose later. Children essentially have to ‘earn their right to write’ (Young & Ferguson, 2024). However, this sense of ordering is not supported by research evidence. Indeed, it is contradicted by it.
Transcription-only instruction does not improve writing quality
Kim et al. (2021) conducted a meta-analysis of 24 studies and found that instruction focused solely on transcription skills (spelling and handwriting) did not yield statistically significant effects on children’s writing quality or productivity. By contrast, multi-component instructional approaches, which teach transcription alongside composition strategies, produced large and consistent improvements across all measured dimensions, including quality, productivity, and text structure. Harris et al. (2023) tested this experimentally with pupils from economically underserved areas. Integrated instruction outperformed a business-as-usual approach across major measures, including writing quality, planning, and spelling. The researchers concluded that concerns about cognitive overload were not supported by their data, suggesting that young children can (and should) learn about transcription and composition simultaneously.
The policy implication is direct. An assessment framework that promotes transcription-only teaching is directing teachers towards an approach the evidence shows does not develop children’s writing.
Oral language is critical but entirely absent from the Writing ELG
Oral language is among the most consistent predictors of early writing quality with effects that grow stronger as children develop (Seoane et al., 2025). Rodríguez et al. (2024) found that oral compositional skills contribute to writing quality independently of transcription ability. McIntyre et al. (2025) found that children’s oral story telling directly predicted their written story quality.
Kim & Schatschneider’s expanded model of writing development (2017) shows that oral language serves as the bridge through which higher-order cognitive skills (inference, perspective-taking, content knowledge) reach the written page. A child who has not been given opportunities to compose lacks a critical foundation for later writing success (Young & Ferguson 2025).
The Writing ELG contains no reference to oral language. Indeed, children are not required to speak to meet the goal. Instead, they can have writing dictated to them by their teacher. An assessment that ignores one of writing’s most powerful predictors is not measuring writing well, even on its own terms.
3. The DfE Is Contradicting Itself
The strongest argument for reform does not come from external research. It comes from the DfE itself. The Writing Framework, published in July 2025, adopts the Simple View of Writing.
The Simple View Of Writing As Illustrated In The DfE’ Writing Framework (p.17)
It emphasises the importance of composition and purpose and audience. It also warns explicitly that ‘too often, pupils learn to write for the circular purpose of learning to write.’ It also states: ‘transcription is not writing’. However, the DfE’s own writing model is now abandoned.
The ELG reproduces only the three transcription criteria. Composition is stated not to be required. Dictated transcription is validated as evidence. This is a structural failure: the DfE is defining writing one way and measuring it in another.
4. What The ELG Produces In Classrooms
Assessment shapes teachers’ practice. When the statutory measure for writing only rewards transcription, schools will concentrate on what is rewarded. However, Gerde et al. (2022) report that children in preschool classrooms where teachers support composition and meaning-making alongside transcription demonstrate more advanced writing by the end of the year than peers in classrooms where the focus was restricted to transcription skills alone.
A Reception year shaped by the current ELG produces a predictable profile: children who can form letters and encode phonetically but who have never been asked to generate an idea, write for a reader, plan what they want to say, or experience writing as a joyful and communicative act of meaning-making and meaning-sharing. We run the very real risk of developing the most reluctant, listless and unmotivated writers for a generation.
5. The Important Stuff The ELG Doesn’t See
The ELG’s product-focused, transcription-only framework makes two categories of developmentally significant writing behaviour entirely invisible.
Emergent writing behaviours
Children begin demonstrating compositional behaviour long before they can encode conventionally. Rowe (2018) found that children as young as three can successfully select topics, generate ideas, organise content and revise their writing. Rohloff et al. (2025) found that preschoolers frequently revise mid-composition, adjusting their plans and vocabulary as their thinking develops. These are executive function behaviours: self-regulation, monitoring, revision. They are present in children entering Reception. However, the ELG doesn’t recognise this as important to assess.
Spelling development through informed attempts
The ELG’s phonetic spelling criterion encourages teachers to simply get children to write words they already know their children will be able to spell conventionally. This simply flatters to deceive (Young & Ferguson, 2026). It tells us very little. Research also shows that these kinds of restrictions are counterproductive. Children who are encouraged to attempt words they really want to write (using informed spellings) make greater gains in phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge, reading and conventional spelling than those who are restricted to writing already known words (Ouellette & Sénéchal, 2008). Attempting to spell a word requires active engagement with phoneme-grapheme relationships; reproducing already known words does not. Young & Ferguson (2026) also note that children’s informed spellings are the most valuable diagnostic information for teachers, revealing precisely what each child understands about the alphabetic code.
An ELG that encourages a ‘write only what you can already spell’ culture does not support spelling development. It impedes it while simultaneously constraining vocabulary development, thwarting children’s compositional ambitions and removing the diagnostic information that good writing teaching depends on (Young & Ferguson, 2026).
6. System Consequences
The ELG’s shortcomings do not affect only the Reception year. They will invariably generate system-level consequences.
National data distortion
A child who can transcribe a dictated sentence with correctly formed letters can now meet the ELG. That same child may be unable to independently compose a sentence, sustain a piece of writing, or write for any purpose beyond regurgitation. The data derived from ELG judgements will therefore overstate the proportion of children who are genuinely able to write. While there is no doubt that the lowering of expectations will increase the number of children who technically achieve the ELG for writing, national performance data will be misleading.
The Key Stage 1 transition gap
In KS1, children are required to independently plan, draft, revise and proof-read their compositions. These demands draw on composition, executive function and oral language – the two thirds of the Simple View of Writing the ELG does not assess. Children trained only in transcription will face a sharp increase in cognitive demand at this transition without the foundational development that will equip them to meet it. School leaders and Key Stage One teachers should be concerned.
Assessment integrity
The exemplification video accompanying the ELG carries the following disclaimer: ‘While it features real children in real school settings, their actual developmental levels may differ from what is shown, and some scenes include acting for demonstration purposes.’ Exemplification materials that use acted footage cannot calibrate professional judgement. This is not acceptable.
7. Required Reforms
The core problem is straightforward: The ELG defines writing as a skill it is not. The solution requires no new conceptual framework as the DfE’s own Writing Framework already provides one. What is required is alignment between what the Department says writing is and what it’s choosing to measure.
The research base points clearly to what better provision looks like. Young and Ferguson (2021, 2022, 2024, 2025) describe it as the ‘communicative orientation’: an approach in which transcription and composition are developed together, in which children write daily for genuine purposes and real audiences, in which oral language is treated as a foundation rather than a supplement, and in which the classroom functions as a community of writers in which children see themselves as people who have things to say and the means to say them. Research consistently shows that children in classrooms that take this integrated, communicative approach develop stronger writing skills than those in classrooms dominated by transcription-only drills (Bingham et al., 2017; Young & Ferguson, 2024). This is the model a revised ELG should support.
We call on policymakers to commission an immediate, evidence-led review of the Writing ELG with the following objectives:
1. Adopt the Simple View of Writing as the organising framework. A revised ELG should require evidence across all three components: transcription, executive function and composition. This is the model the DfE’s Writing Framework already endorses. The ELG and the Framework must say the same thing.
2. Require independent composition. Children must demonstrate that they can generate and communicate their own ideas in writing. The guidance stating that composition is not required must be removed. Research demonstrates that teaching transcription and composition together produces better outcomes than teaching transcription alone at every age group studied.
3. Recognise oral language. Oral language is a direct, independent predictor of writing quality. A revised ELG should include criteria that acknowledge oral compositional capacity as a component of the writing picture.
4. Recognise the writing process. Planning, drafting and revision are integral to writing development from the earliest stages. Preschool-age children demonstrate these behaviours when writing is taught well. Criteria should be added that values engagement with the writing processes and not only with the written product.
5. Include purpose and audience. Writing that communicates to a real reader for a genuine purpose develops more advanced writers than writing produced as a transcriptional exercise. Classrooms where children write for genuine purposes can go on to produce better outcomes. An ELG that ignores purpose removes the incentive to create such classrooms.
6. Revise the approach to spelling. Children who attempt to spell words they really want to write (using informed spellings) make greater gains in phonological awareness, orthographic knowledge and conventional spelling than do those children who are restricted to words they already know. A revised framework should value children’s ambitious encoding attempts and not penalise them.
7. Remove dictation as assessment evidence. Dictation measures whether a child can transcribe someone else’s sentence. It cannot measure composition, vocabulary choice, sentence construction or authorial intent. It should be retained as a teaching tool but removed as an assessment instrument.
8. Replace the exemplification materials. Authentic exemplification showing children composing independently in real classroom contexts must replace the current acted footage.
Every year that this issue persists, hundreds of thousands of children will complete the Reception year assessed as writers on a measure that does not assess writing. At present, teachers are being directed towards a version of writing that the DfE’s own guidance tells them is insufficient. We suspect it will be children from disadvantaged backgrounds who will pay the highest price.
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Bingham, G. E., Quinn, M. F., & Gerde, H. K. (2017). Examining early childhood teachers’ writing practices: Associations between pedagogical supports and children’s writing skills. Early childhood research quarterly, 39, 35-46.
Department for Education (2024). Early Years Foundation Stage Statutory Framework.
Gerde, H. K., Wright, T. S., & Bingham, G. E. (2022). Sharing their ideas with the world: Creating meaningful writing experiences for young children. American educator, 45(4), 34.
Harris, K.R., Kim, Y-S.G., Yim, S., Camping, A. & Graham, S. (2023). Yes, they can: Developing transcription and compositional skills together to help children write informative essays at grades 1 and 2. Contemporary Educational Psychology, 72, 102131.
Kim, Y-S.G. & Schatschneider, C. (2017). Expanding the developmental models of writing: A direct and indirect effects model of developmental writing. Journal of Educational Psychology, 109(1), 35–50.
Kim, Y-S.G., Yang, D., Reyes, M. & Connor, C. (2021). Multicomponent writing instruction appears to yield better results. Educational Research Review, 34, 100401.
McIntyre, A., Scott, A., McNeill, B., & Gillon, G. (2025). Comparing young children’s oral and written story retelling: the role of ideation and transcription. Speech, Language and Hearing, 28(1), 2357450.
Ouellette, G. P., & Sénéchal, M. (2008). A window into early literacy: Exploring the cognitive and linguistic underpinnings of invented spelling. Scientific Studies of Reading, 12(2), 195-219.
Rodríguez, C., Jiménez, J. E., & Balade, J. (2025). The impact of oral language and transcription skills on early writing production in kindergarteners: Productivity and quality. Early Childhood Education Journal, 53(4), 1-11.
Rohloff, R., Ridley, J., Quinn, M. F., & Zhang, X. (2025). Young Children’s Composing Processes: Idea Transformations in Verbalizations from Pre-Writing to Post-Writing. Early Childhood Education Journal, 53(6), 1961-1971.
Rowe, D. W. (2018). Research & policy: The unrealized promise of emergent writing: Reimagining the way forward for early writing instruction. Language Arts, 95(4), 229-241.
Seoane, R. C., Wang, J., Cao, Y., & Kim, Y. S. G. (2025). Unpacking the relation between oral language and written composition: A meta-analysis. Review of Educational Research, 00346543251320359.
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