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We are delighted to announce the publication of our latest book: How To Teach Writing.

It’s our hope that teachers and school-leaders will find this book interesting and useful. Our own journey from being discontented and ineffective writing teachers to Writing For Pleasure teachers has been truly transformative. As we reflect on the principles, research, and practices discussed throughout this book, it becomes apparent that a paradigm shift is not only necessary but achievable. We can turn the tide on pupils’ pernicious underachievement and dislike for writing! 

Informed by extensive research and real-world application, the practices that we share in the book promise to reshape your classroom or school into a vibrant writing community. A place where you and your students write daily, explore genres, read high-quality mentor texts, and hone your craft through iterative and innovative processes.

The book starts by delving into the research landscape, sharing with you the 14 principles of world-class writing teaching. We also discuss the profound nature of the reading/writing connection and how we can support children with SEND.

We talk about how exceptional writing teachers have a comprehensive understanding of how to plan writing units across the EYFS-KS2. We also felt it was important to decipher exactly what it is the EYFS Framework and the KS1 and KS2 STA Writing Statements are asking teachers to evidence. We’ve demystified this process, offering clarity for colleagues.

Our ‘How to…‘ guides were written to empower teachers with practical strategies. From instilling purpose and audience into your writing units to fostering a love for reading, establishing success criteria, and navigating effective grammar lessons, we’ve tried to cover the spectrum of skills essential for both you and your pupils.

The vision for effective writing teaching is clear – students should not only master curriculum objectives but they should also learn how to live the writer’s life. They should engage in personal writing projects, receive daily feedback, and participate in meaningful teacher-pupil conferences.

The establishment of The Writing For Pleasure Centre, and this publication in particular, marks a new collective effort to redefine writing education. Drawing on over 600 pieces of literature, case studies, and empirical research, this approach is a testament to the impact evidence-based writing practices can have on creating purposeful and pleasurable writing classrooms (Young & Ferguson 2024).

Your journey only starts here. The future of writing education lies in the hands of dedicated educators like you who have embraced innovation and will foster a genuine love for writing in your classrooms.

Individual license – £10.95

School/Institution license – £54.75

or FREE for members

Why teach this unit?

It makes sense to invite children to make a book of first words as this is probably one of the first books they’ve seen and read themselves growing up. I would hope that you would have similar books in your classroom library too.

Children like these kinds of ‘list books’ – where something different is shared on each page. They also see it as an opportunity to share about the things they know about or that are important to them. It’s nice to invite children to make their Book Of First Words for an audience younger than them. For example, babies and toddlers.

The aim of this article is to share the common perspectives that are held by teachers when teaching the youngest of writers, and to help you think about what your perspective might be. Your view of how best to teach early writers will be shaped by your own past school experiences, how you were trained, how you undertake writing as an adult, your choice of reading on the subject, and of course by school and government policies (Young & Ferguson 2021). The most common perspectives include the following:

• The ‘writing-readiness’ perspective
• The naturalistic perspective
• The structuralist perspective
• The ‘reading-first’ perspective
• The communicative perspective 

Your perspective may be influenced by some or even all of these, though one will usually dominate. In fact, we quite like viewing each perspective as having a dial next to it which you can adjust according to the amount of influence you think each perspective has on your view of teaching the youngest of writers. For example, this is how The Writing For Pleasure Centre’s perspective has developed:

It’s important to say that we didn’t choose where the dials go on our own, but were instead directed by what the research evidence says about early writing development. You can undertake this reading too. We’ve made all the research papers that inform our thinking available in our free-access handbook LINK.

An interesting thing to think about is how the dials can be moved. We are not suggesting they will change from moment to moment, but we might move the dials on certain days, weeks or months that we are teaching, depending on what we think our class needs most at the time. For example, during some weeks, we might want to discuss what we think makes a really great story, so the needle on the structuralist perspective will go up. Or, at the beginning of the year, we will want to really focus on getting children’s handwriting and encoding skills up – so we might turn up the ‘writing readiness’ dial for that time. We might decide we are really interested to see what children are capable of doing when they are writing together without our constant intervention and demands, so we might for a while turn up the dial for the naturalistic orientation. We do, however, expect that the communicative dial will stay largely the same.

It’s important to realise that all these orientations have their strengths and weaknesses, but if taken to extremes, they are likely to cause teachers and pupils problems. Why not read the descriptions below before thinking about how you would set the dials to match your perspective? 

The ‘writing-readiness’ orientation 

The extreme version of this perspective may be referred to as: transcription first, fast and only teaching (Rohloff et al. 2022), the presentational-skills ideology, a skills-based worksheet curriculum (Dahl & Freppon 1995), the ‘not real writing’ approach (Avineri et al. 2015), the fragmented and discontinuous approach (Dunsmuir & Blatchford 2004), mechanics-oriented teaching, didactic-only instruction, the bottom-up perspective, code-based teaching (Quinn & Bingham 2018), drill-and-skill-to-kill-the-will, piecemeal, sequenced and scripted, recite for writing, writing as a cognitive-only matter (Johnston 2019), the dictation orientation (Lancaster 2007), the ‘conceptual, procedural and generative’ knowledge perspective (Puranik & Lonigan 2014), the component skills perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), formula writing (VanNess et al. 2013), the ‘write ‘correctly’ like an adult’ perspective (Daniels 2014), the artificial approach (Thomas 2005), the systematic procedures perspective (Bruyère & Pendergrass 2020), the exercise approach (Håland et al. 2019), the ‘only conventional writing is real writing’ perspective (Bradford & Wyse 2020) or the ‘additive-cumulative’ view of writing (Tolchinsky 2017).

We know that children who don’t master the basic skills of writing early on in their educational journey can go on to underperform and even to experience school failure (Berninger et al. 2002; Abbott et al. 2010; Young & Ferguson 2021). ‘Writing-readiness’ teachers rightly recognise this. However, when taken too far, teachers will focus their attention on getting children to transcribe accurately and  conventionally first before they are allowed to begin making and sharing meaning through book-making and other writing. According to Snyders (2014) and Rowe (2018), this is an instructional mistake. Indeed, such an approach can have a significant and damaging effect on children’s writing development (Kim et al. 2021). It’s suggested that this perspective is ineffective in realising its own aims, and is most commonly used by teachers who lack confidence in teaching the compositional aspects of writing and so resort to teaching what are for them the more comfortable elements of transcription.

The conception of writing and the writer. Taken to its limits, a ‘writing- readiness’ teacher will view writing largely as a set of rules and processes to be followed in order to arrive at a product, a piece of evidence that shows how or whether students are fulfilling the narrow objective of applying and showcasing transcriptional skills with a high degree of accuracy. The meaningful construction of texts by children must be denied, delayed or heavily restricted until they have somehow ‘mastered’ the basic skills of letter formation, handwriting and spelling (Tolchinsky 2017). The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing their pupils build on these basic skills incrementally over time, and from the feeling that they have done their job by ‘opening the door’ to writing for their pupils.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The approach is teacher-centred, with the teacher as the gatekeeper and controller of all knowledge, cognition and skills. Teaching is largely focused on isolated transcribing activities, with little sense of the social or collaborative aspects of writing and meaning making. Students are seen as empty vessels to be filled, coming into school with nothing that would be useful to them in learning how to write and book-make (Smith 1988a; Young et al. 2022). These teachers typically hold the view that for children to learn how to write, they must first recognise that they can’t (Roser et al. 2014). They concentrate largely on what children’s writing looks like rather than what it is trying to share. In this conception, teachers position their pupils as ‘exercise writers’ who must practise specific skills before somehow ‘earning the right to write’ and gaining access to opportunities to make and share meaning with others.

The content of the writing curriculum. The teacher’s priority is the teaching of correct letter formation, letter/sound correspondence, spelling and handwriting. Children don’t spend much time learning about the processes involved in crafting texts through to publication and performance. Instead, when children are eventually allowed to participate in compositional writing, it is typically finished in a single session, and is seen only by the teacher. Students don’t get an opportunity to share their writing with others. In this orientation, the feeling is that children shouldn’t write unless they can talk in ‘full sentences’ and in Standard English. The assumption here is that, if they were allowed to engage in compositional writing, there would be no profitable outcome since they would only make grammatical errors which would subsequently need to be unlearnt (Snell & Andrews 2017).

Teaching strategies. Children spend the majority of their time copying the teacher by writing letters, practising handwriting and writing their names (Hall et al. 2015). Writing is broken down into a set of skills that should be taught and mastered one at a time. Teachers will mostly rely on copying, dictation, ‘hold the sentence’ activities, drills, repetitive exercises, letter formation practice, handwriting practice and letter/sound encoding practice. Children may, on occasion, be given the opportunity to write in response to preprinted sentence starters or picture prompt worksheets. The teacher will model letter formation and possibly even a specific mandated handwriting style. However, they won’t be seen modelling the crafting of real text or how to live the writer’s life.

Limitations:

• When taken to the extreme, this perspective is fundamentally flawed. It fails to understand that writing skills are developed interdependently. They can’t be mastered in isolation (Puranik & Lonigan, 2011; Rowe & Wilson 2015; Kim 2022). This means the perspective is ineffective in achieving its own aims. The withholding, delaying, or restricting of meaningful writing opportunities until basic skills have been mastered also goes against research recommendations (Gerde et al. 2012; Graham et al. 2012; Rowe et al. 2022; Cabell et al. 2023).
• Teachers shouldn’t confuse encoding, spelling and handwriting development with writing development (Tolchinsky 2017). Spelling and encoding represent only a fraction of what we must develop in the youngest of writers (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). In a ‘writing- readiness’ orientation, children only learn about transcribing, yet we know that they can only learn about writing from instruction about all the aspects of writing and being a writer, and through repeated daily meaningful practice (Feldgus & Cardonick 2002). Copying out isolated words and letters is not the same as writing (Ferreiro 1982).
• According to Johnston (2019) and Young & Ferguson (2022a), teachers are right to give their attention and focus to the cognitive dimensions of learning to write, but they may well run the serious risk of failing to see or care that this cognitive development is emotionally and motivationally laden and embedded in social and meaningful practice. It’s not what ‘writing- readiness’ teachers focus on that’s the problem, it’s always what they leave out (Young & Ferguson 2021).
• The possible insistence on children always writing conventional spellings is not developmentally appropriate when working with early writers (Cabel et al. 2023).
• According to Mackenzie & Veresov (2013), ‘writing-readiness’ teachers can disrupt children’s natural text construction processes by underestimating or denying the significance of drawing as part of a child’s writing process. Indeed, ‘writing-readiness’ teachers often place little value on how children’s drawings contribute significantly to their writing development. 
• According to Kim (2022), ‘writing-readiness’ teachers don’t always recognise how important oral language development is for children’s writing development. Children may rarely be asked to  engage in activities which develop their oral language. Instead, the ‘speaking’ is often undertaken on the child’s behalf by the teacher (LINK). 
• Children can often feel as though they are being asked to prepare for something that never actually comes. Their learning is rarely linked to composing writing. For example, Håland et al. (2019 p.70) state that ‘it is unclear whether students understand for what purpose they are exercising’. As a result, children can become uninterested in writing.
• If children are allowed the opportunity to share meaning, ‘writing- readiness’ teachers will often step in and write the message on the child’s behalf by getting them to dictate what it is they want to say. As a result, these children don’t learn how they could write without a teacher present. Indeed, in this conception, teachers can too often assume all cognitive responsibility for the writing activities that take place in the classroom, leaving the children passive and actually learning very little (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).
• These teachers find themselves focusing their attention on, and getting frustrated about, what children can’t do when compared to what experienced adult writers can do. This is in contrast to knowing what is developmentally appropriate for children of that age (Rowe 2018).
• Without an opportunity to participate in crafting meaningful texts for real audiences, children can quickly become owners of a set of arbitrary writing skills that they may not remember because they very rarely use and apply them (Cabel et al. 2023).

The naturalistic orientation

Terms which can be associated with this conception of writing include: the creative perspective (Peterson et al. 2018), intent participation learning (Trevarthen 2011), self-directed learning, child-centred, child-guided, holistic, whole language (Dahl & Freppon 1995), personal growth (Erickson 2018), the open-ended exploration approach, composition centric, language experience, language awareness, the romantic approach, the free-to-be-me approach, the hippie-free-for-all approach, self-discovery, the ‘leave it to chance’ orientation, or, as Berstein (cited in Rose 2008) called it, ‘the invisible approach’. This approach believes that the young writer is sovereign and that a high degree of teacher intervention only ever results in the stifling of their organic processes and compositions. The teacher does not provide a purpose or context for the writing since projects are to be determined by the children through their daily play and discoveries.

Teachers who subscribe to the naturalistic perspective believe that children can learn many things about writing without needing to be taught directly about them (Clay 1975; Teale & Sulzby, 1986; Robins & Treiman 2010). Instruction is seen by them to come at too high a price if it puts children off ever wanting to write again. Therefore, at its most extreme, those who hold this view consider that instruction should only ever be given at the invitation of the child. These teachers also recognise, rightly, that the youngest of writers develop at their own pace and acquire skills at different rates and times. As a result, their instruction is responsive and focuses more on children’s individual needs rather than on spending inordinate amounts of time teaching a ‘homogenised collective’ (Rohloff et al. 2022). A successful teacher is seen as one who nurtures children to have the volition and the intrinsic motivation to continue developing themselves as writers.

The conception of writing and the writer. Teachers who support such an approach believe that students must begin their learning about writing and being a writer from the understanding that writing is for expression and communication (Håland et al. 2019). Unlike ‘writing-readiness’ teachers, naturalistic teachers believe children learn that writing is a meaning-sharing device before they are able to produce it conventionally. They do this by using their emergent writing practices (Clay 2001; Feldgus & Cardonick 2002; Ray & Glover 2008; Byington & Kim 2017). According to Tolchinsky (2017 p.149), ‘the principal source of knowledge for understanding writing is writing itself. It is by using writing that children will learn to master it’. Finally, these teachers try to look beyond children’s final texts, and are often more interested in the processes and behaviours children exhibited and developed as they crafted them (Dyson 1988; Glasswell 1999).

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The teacher’s role is to allow children’s learning to evolve naturally as a result of their innate curiosity about writing and being writers. Teachers therefore wait for children to bring their writing interests to them, and then help facilitate the child’s production of a successful and meaningful text. These teachers believe that children should be free to experiment and play with language. Taken to its extreme, any attempt by a teacher to impose or imprint language rules or features of genre onto children is considered an unnecessary ‘roadblock’ to their ability to develop their own unique expressions and voice (Thomas 2005). These teachers instead focus their attention on children’s intentions rather than on their ability to adhere to adult conventions of writing (Rowe 2018). Trevarthen (2011 p.175) suggests that ‘children should be respected for their intuitive abilities, not just trained in skills. They should be given more encouragement for their own creative learning than the regulatory authorities, who concentrate on the goals of educational instruction’. These teachers may well believe that a ‘writing-readiness’ approach is just a daily reminder to children of what they cannot do, only serving to dehumanise them and make them feel shame, inadequacy, anxiety and confusion (Erickson 2018). Naturalistic teachers instead wish to focus on building up children’s confidence, interest and engagement in being a writer, and on creating in them a desire to take up writing as a life-long pursuit.

The content of the writing curriculum. Teachers who are very sympathetic to this concept will regard attainment targets, curriculum objectives and other criteria as adult-created concerns which are imposed too early, resulting in the oppression and restriction of children’s innate abilities to develop themselves as writers. According to Trevarthen (2011 p.176), ‘the obvious conclusion from the new infant psychology is that educational practices that intend to bring all children to the best possible level of competence…must be ones that welcome and support the motives of the child’. Rather than  receiving a predetermined sequence of knowledge and skills, children should be concurrently acquiring many overlapping layers of skills and knowledge through the pursuit of their own personal writing interests (Johnston 2019). Therefore, children choose their own writing ideas to pursue, focusing on their own funds of knowledge, language and identity (Young et al. 2022). This results in instruction being responsive and given largely to individuals. For example, they might be taught how drawing can help with meaning-making, how to give ‘sentimental’ feedback to their friends, and how they can improve the fluency of their transcribing – if they want to.

Teaching strategies. Teachers who subscribe to this view will focus on creating an environment where children can naturally and implicitly pick up skills and knowledge about writing and being a writer from their peers and their teachers (Hall et al. 2015). Children can also learn through participation in self-directed writing activity, for example, by using the writing centre (Byington & Kim 2017). Children will naturally want to learn about transcription, form and other conventions as they craft and make texts in a social environment amongst others, including their writer-teacher (Rowe 2008; Harmey & Wilkinson 2019). Self-expressionist teachers focus their attention on teaching holistically through conversation between themselves and their young writers and by promoting dialogue between peers as they all write together (Quinn & Bingham 2018).

Limitations

• The main limitation is that, as we know, writing doesn’t develop naturally through experience alone. These teachers often fail to see the importance of teaching the cognitive skills and processes involved in crafting writing and so children can run the risk of later underachievement or school failure due to a lack of systematic, explicit and direct instruction (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). 
• The pursuit of self-expression can also be limiting in the sense that children will not be directed towards engaging in a rich range of writing across many genres and for a variety of purposes and audiences (McCarthy 1994).
• The finished writing pieces are not necessarily required to fulfil the standards needed for final publication. In fact, the ‘product’, which may never be formally published, is seen as unimportant when compared to the creative effort which went into the crafting of it.
• Because of the individualistic nature of this orientation, the social consequences of writing and being a writer can be neglected (Smagorinsky 1987). 
• Children who don’t naturally come to writing are left to their own devices. These children will miss out on opportunities to engage in writing. In extreme cases, they won’t write at all. 
• This kind of approach might be considered unrealistic given the demands of modern curricula, or could even be viewed as a potential violation of children’s privacy or as a cultural intrusion (Sudol & Sudol 1991; McCarthy 1994; Dutro & Kazemi 2006; Zacarian et al. 2017). For example, some consider the approach to hold an outdated romantic or elitist view of writing, creating purely hedonistic writers (Lensmire 1998), that it may only suit ‘the brightest middle-class children’ and that a refusal by teachers to actually teach only reinforces the potential for children from the dominant middle classes to succeed in education, with other children ‘supportively encouraged to fail’ (Martin cited in Cremin & Myhill 2012 p.20).

The structuralist orientation 

Terms which are associated with this position include: the genre approach, the forms of writing approach, the semiotic perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), academic socialisation, textual competence, the conformity approach, the recipe approach, painting by numbers (Thomas 2005), the textual police approach (Watkins 1999) or what Dixon (1987) calls the ‘strait-jacket’ approach.

Extreme structuralist orientations insist on children’s mastery of different forms of writing in order to be successful in the world. Genre knowledge is seen as powerful, giving children access to important cultural capital. In contrast to the naturalistic orientation, it maintains that writing products have just as much importance as the processes used in their creation. Genre teaching is seen by some as a social justice issue, giving all children equal access to the highly-valued social practices and purposes of writing (Bazerman et al. 2017).

The conception of writing and the writer. ‘We learn genres as we learn language, and communication would be impossible without them’ (Maybin 2001 p.66). Literacy is seen essentially as a functional social practice as well as an individual one. The writer writes with the understanding that their writing will be socially situated, and that therefore there is a need to regularly consider its purpose and audience (Coffin 2006; Martin & Rose 2008; Halliday 2013). The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing children successfully applying genre conventions and writing in a variety of different forms.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. The teacher’s role is dominant. These teachers like to teach features of genre and look for evidence of them in children’s final written products. For example, they will look to cover a range of genres such as story, information, poetry and persuasive pieces, and teach children what should be included to create a successful text (Kenner 2000; Donovan 2001). Pupils have a subordinate role. Their performance is judged by the extent to which they have fulfilled the teacher’s generated criteria for success (Morris & Peterson 2020; Aitken & Halkowski 2023).

The content of the writing curriculum. The focus of a genre-based curriculum is on the transmission from teacher to pupil of knowledge about the structural and linguistic features necessary for effective communication in certain (perhaps privileged or outdated) genres. The view is that genres follow rules which can and should be taught to children (Martin & Rose 2008).

Teaching strategies. These teachers often create contrived tasks in which children are simply there to make products for teacher evaluation. The texts are being created to show what’s been learnt, as opposed to sharing meaning with others out in the wider world. This is one of the main differences between structuralist teachers and their more communicative-based colleagues who we will describe later.

Limitations

• In this perspective, children must write on a topic of the teacher’s choosing. This can limit the quality of some children’s writing, since the best performers under these conditions are often those who share the same knowledge and identities as their teacher (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a; Young et al. 2022; LINK).
• Children’s oral language and their drawings are not always seen by teachers as useful or important in assessing or understanding the child’s writing, despite the fact that multimodality is an important part of genre theory (Halliday 2013). This is another profound difference between a structuralist teacher and their counterparts who subscribe to the communicative orientation. (Quinn & Bingham 2018).
• This view takes little account of the fact that genres do not remain static, that they change over time and according to circumstances, and are often manipulated and hybridised by writers. The idea of ‘genre play’ through experimentation and exploration is not made available to children in this restricted and conventional conception (Freedman 1994; Rosen 2017). Children are simply asked to reproduce the genre in the way their teacher likes it, but not to reimagine it (Young et al. 2022). 
• The prescriptive stance means that children are given no opportunity to create their own genres and are unlikely to be exposed to new and emerging ones such as digital literacies. They only learn to reproduce the given genre-related text structures decided upon by the teacher (Richardson 1998).
• There is often a failure to see that expository (nonfiction) texts can be enhanced when hybridised with more expressive genres and features (Bakhtin cited in Maybin 2001). 
• The genres children are interested in or use outside of the school environment are seen as secondary or irrelevant to the genres the teacher deems as important or socially significant. 
• Writing may be judged as ‘successful’ mainly in terms of the application of ‘genre features’. Judgments will be less concerned with purpose and audience, the quality of content, style, originality and interest. Indeed, the children’s writing rarely achieves a true social purpose but is instead a fake artefact produced solely for the teacher’s evaluation (Rosen 2017; Watkins 1999). 
• It is utterly possible that children know about and can already write successfully and creatively in the dominant genres of society. Lengthy and explicit teaching of linguistic ‘rules’ may therefore contribute little to their development (Schneider 2003). 
• Children may be taught a very large number of genres but not necessarily in depth, with textual features overshadowing purpose. As a result, teachers ‘obscure the forest by planting so many trees’ (Chuy et al. 2011 p.178).
• There can often be little concern for children’s personal growth as writers and for their personal writing projects.

The ‘reading first’ orientation

Also known as the ‘reading readiness philosophy’ (Hall et al. 2015), the focus of this approach is to delay the teaching of writing in favour of teaching early reading (Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Graham & Hebert 2000). 

The conception of writing and the writer. Reading is seen as more important than writing. After learning to read, children are regarded as needing the support of a text to be both a stimulus and a model for writing. Writing is interpreted as the study of a single text, followed by the setting of a host of arbitrary writing tasks related to it, which are to be completed to the teacher’s specification and for the teacher’s evaluation. The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing the children write in response to the writing tasks they, or the scheme-writer, have devised.

The relationship between teacher and pupil. There are many similarities here with the ‘writing readiness’ orientation. The teacher’s priority is to teach the incremental skills of early reading. Only when this is done will they begin to teach children to write. The teacher will be the gatekeeper of what is best in terms of a suitable text to copy, and the pupils will simply receive the teacher’s choice, interpretation and subsequent associated writing tasks. Children aren’t allowed to make a genuine and spontaneous response to the texts they read or love. Instead, they must only respond in the ways their teacher demands.

The content of the writing curriculum. The teacher’s focus is on children’s ability to use sound/letter correspondence and to encode. They will therefore set writing tasks for assessment purposes, to evaluate children’s encoding abilities. The teacher is not really concerned with what it is the child wants to say through writing.

Teaching strategies. Teachers who adopt this approach feel children need to read, chant and learn texts off by heart and internalise common structures before they are able to write for themselves (Harste 2012; Tolchinsky 2017; LINK).

Limitations 

• This orientation not only goes against research recommendations, it’s also developmentally inappropriate. This is because language, reading and writing need to develop concurrently (Fitzgerald & Shanahan 2000; Graham 2020a, 2020b; Graham & Hebert 2011; Graham et al. 2018a; Graham et al 2018b; Graham et al. 2020; Mayer 2007; Young & Ferguson 2023; LINK).
• It’s a little known fact, but early writing is one of the best predictors of children’s later reading success (NELP 2008). For example, writing invented spellings increases children’s reading skills, and the more opportunities children have to write the better their reading becomes (Harste 2012; Jones et al. 2010).  
• Weaknesses in reading often stem from neglect in writing. Students may put more care and attention into their reading when they have had more opportunities to assume the role of writer (Elbow 2004).
• According to Elbow (2004), writing is an easier and more inclusive activity for young children to access. He explains how children are beautifully positioned for writing as they can write all and any words that they can say (if teachers are willing to accept approximations and early marking making as being children’s early writing). In contrast, children can only read the words they have learnt to read or decode – a much smaller pool of lexicon than is available to them in writing. Therefore, it’s perfectly possible, and indeed advantageous, for there to be no delay between learning to read and learning to write.
• Young & Ferguson (2021, 2022a) explain how, through writing, children learn a great deal about reading and being a reader. For example, writing encourages children to comprehend and control texts. Children also come to realise that books are made by people just like themselves – writers. Writers who, like them, are trying to share meaning, connect, and communicate with others. This writerly knowledge helps them become better readers (Young & Ferguson 2023).
• The approach denies children exposure to the very vital compositional processes which are used throughout life. For example: generating and publishing original thoughts, ideas and concepts; reflecting on lived experiences; responding to one’s own reading material; wanting to share something they know a lot about; giving an opinion and wanting to make changes to the world. This is instead done by the teacher or scheme writer. In other words, strategies which could show children how writing can and will relate to their own life are sidelined or even refused (Young et al. 2022).
• Finally, Shanahan (2016) explains it best when he states that early literacy instruction focused disproportionately on reading and phonics is not enough if children are to read and write well.

The communicative orientation 

There are a number of terms associated with this orientation. They are: the community/environmental approach, the integrative approach (Rohloff et al. 2022), an interdependent approach, authoring (Bruyère & Pendergrass 2020), social practice perspective (Mayer 2007; Peterson et al. 2018), the literacy club perspective (Smiths 1988), writing experiences (Rowe 2018), sociocultural orientation (Bradford & Wyse 2020), socio-psycholinguistic perspective (Dahl & Freppon 1995), meaning-making/ meaning-sharing orientation, the Piagetian perspective (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019), social connection, social participation, the ‘writing for a reader’ approach (Nystrand 1989), literacy as a social practice, meaningful literacy, relevant literacy, or, the ‘living the writer’s life’ approach (Kaufman 2009).

Teachers who adopt this orientation encourage children to see themselves as writers who proactively engage in writing. They hold the belief that it’s through meaning-sharing in real-life contexts that children acquire the knowledge and skills involved in producing successful texts to be read, enjoyed and, importantly, understood by others (Hall et al. 2015). Therefore, opportunities to share meaning run alongside instruction directed towards mastery of the alphabetic system, spelling, letter-sound relations and letter formation (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). The classroom is seen as a community which has the collective mission of fulfilling different purposes, communicating with different audiences, creating academically successful texts, achieving social goals and contributing to a variety of social groups and contexts (Lensmire 1998; Schultz & Fecho 2000; Bazerman 2016). Teachers recognise that genre and writing cannot be separated (Russell 2023). However, they are also aware that genre-teaching can sometimes become overly prescriptive, insistent upon the inclusion of possibly arbitrary genre features and not reflective of the way writers actually craft texts. They therefore place emphasis on children writing successful texts which match the needs of their audiences (Morris & Peterson 2020; Aitken & Halkowski 2023). 

It’s argued that, if denied the opportunity to participate in crafting meaningful texts for real audiences, children can quickly become owners of a set of arbitrary writing skills that they never get an opportunity to use in a real context. Instead, these skills are left to rust in the metaphorical writing shed at the end of the cognitive garden (Young & Ferguson 2022a).

The conception of writing and the writer. Children will only understand what writing is, what it is for, and what it means to be a writer, if they write everyday in a social and cultural context that matches what writers actually do (Tolentino 2013). James Britton (1972) argued that a child’s writing should be doing ‘work’, be in ‘operation’, and that artificial stimuli are often unnecessary since the world is always ready and waiting for the child to write about it and for it. Young writers are seen as active, discerning, experimenting and engaging in the world through writing (Hymes 1974; Subero et al 2016; Rosen 2017). 

The teacher gains satisfaction from seeing children develop their own writer’s process and the ability to write successful and meaningful texts which fulfil their own intentions, reach genuine audiences, and, in the process, also achieve the requirements of the curriculum.

The relationship between teachers and pupils. Cremin & Myhill (2012) use the word ‘reciprocal’ to describe a relationship of equality between teacher and pupil. The term characterises this approach, where the teacher’s role is to create a community of writers, or a ‘literacy club’ (Smith 1988b) of which all children feel they have membership. Teachers are active participants in the community, working, learning, teaching and writing alongside and amongst their pupils. Children cease being consumers of writing and instead become proactive producers in an environment where differing voices, experiences and texts are published for others (Subero et al. 2016). These teachers believe they need to support the reasons their children are moved to write. They direct their instruction towards giving children all the skills that will help them achieve their aims and desires. 

The content of the writing curriculum. Children are encouraged to use what they learn about letters, words and sentences, to create and share meaning. They acquire knowledge about transcription (spelling, letter formation, handwriting) through being continually invited to use it in purposeful contexts rather than through exercises and worksheets alone (Harmey & Wilkinson 2019; Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b). It is this balance between explicit and direct instruction and meaningful practice which separates the communicative approach from the laissez-faire stance taken by teachers who subscribe whole-heartedly to a naturalistic orientation.

Teaching strategies. Scholars have long bemoaned the lack of a cohesive approach towards early years writing instruction (Rohloff et al. 2022; Young & Ferguson 2022b). Children need continuous, repeated opportunities to engage in writing and apply what they are learning by producing compositions. This is something children are simply not asked to do with any kind of regularity in, for example,  ‘writing-readiness’ and ‘naturalistic’ classrooms. When children are crafting real texts for real purposes and audiences, they have a natural and important reason to learn the foundational knowledge and skills involved in writing. Instruction in spelling and letter formation are seen as being in the service of helping them make and share meaning that others will want to read and understand (Young & Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).

 Limitations

• Children may choose subjects for writing which have the potential to cause tensions or feelings of offence (Collier 2010).
• Children may value some class writing projects more than others. 
• There may be tensions between children expressing themselves and the teacher being required to evaluate the outcome.
• When compared to a naturalistic approach, there is less time devoted to the individual writer’s personal writing projects.

Conclusion

Each of these perspectives contains elements supported by research which, if used thoughtfully and intelligently, can form part of an exceptional early years writing approach (Young & Ferguson 2022b; 2024). According to Erickson (2018), knowledgeable and responsive teachers will adopt an integrated approach, selecting pedagogical practices which best serve the needs of their class (Connor et al. 2006; Young & Ferguson 2021). Indeed, children who write in classrooms which support an integrated approach have better developed writing skills than their peers (Dahl & Freppon 1995; Hall et al. 2003; Dunsmuir & Blatchford 2004; Bingham et al. 2017; Hall 2019a; Barratt-Pugh et al. 2021; Roitisch et al. 2021). 

It seems that the communicative orientation is just such an integrated approach. It is able to bring the ‘writing-readiness’, genre and naturalistic perspectives together because it encourages practitioners to teach skills and genres, to use models and identify criteria, and then facilitate their use in a meaningful way in authentic whole-class writing projects (Young and Ferguson 2022a, 2022b).

With one in four children not achieving the early learning goal for writing (Ofsted 2012, 2022; DfE 2012, 2017), and an increase in young people’s indifference or active dislike for writing (Clark & Teravainen 2017; Clark et al. 2023), we propose an approach which combines rigorous instruction in the processes and craft of writing with principles which contribute significantly to children’s motivation and satisfaction in being writers. An approach which is neither teacher-centred nor child-centred but rather one centred around creating successful writers. We term such a model Writing For Pleasure (Young & Ferguson 2021, 2022a, 2022b), which brings together the very best aspects of all the orientations described in this article to form a rigorous, fresh, holistic, and inclusive philosophy and pedagogy for early writing.

References and further reading

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On the 5th of March 2024, Ofsted published its English education subject report: Telling the story. It purports to evaluate the common strengths and weaknesses of English that Ofsted has seen in schools.

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 teaching is and could be, a crucial part of our work is analysing emerging guidance reports such as the one provided by Ofsted. It is therefore important that we issue a review of what this document has to say.

We will review Ofsted’s report against The Science Of Writing and what we presently know about the fourteen principles of world-class writing teaching (Young & Ferguson 2024). Our review will highlight both the good things shared by Ofsted and also their oversights, and we will provide further exemplification and suggested reading where we think we can add value.

Ofsted’s subject report identifies many of the key cognitive resources The Science Of Writing reports as being essential to children’s writing development. This is good. However, the teaching practices which are subsequently recommended don’t always align with what the research tells us about effective writing teaching. This is particularly true in relation to their recommendations for early writing instruction, and is the most disappointing aspect of the report.

1. Writing fluency

“Primary pupils are not given sufficient teaching and practice to become fluent with transcription (spelling and handwriting) early enough.”

“Pupils are expected to carry out extended writing tasks before they have the required knowledge and skills.”

We appreciate what Ofsted are trying to say here but unfortunately it is clunky and may well be misinterpreted.

✅ Ofsted are right when they say we want children to feel like they can write fluently as quickly as possible and there is a good amount of research on this (Young & Ferguson 2021a, 2022, 2023, 2024; Cabel et al. 2023).

How do we develop writing fluency? [LINK]

❌ However, it’s wrong for Ofsted to suggest that these transcriptional skills should be taught in isolation, away from the craft of authoring. Nor does this foundational knowledge need to be somehow completely mastered before children can be given ‘the right to write stories’. Such a perspective not only goes against research recommendations but is also developmentally unsound. To pursue this recommendation would be an instructional mistake (Young & Ferguson 2022).

Find out more: 

• Young, R. Ferguson, F (2023) How do we develop writing fluency? [LINK]
• Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2023) Getting children up and running as writers [LINK]

2. Oral language development

“Oral composition refers to pupils practising composing sentences orally. This helps pupils to develop their knowledge of vocabulary, grammar and sentence structure, and so prepares them for written composition.”

✅ Ofsted are right. We want children to develop their oral language and listening comprehension skills. Indeed, an ability and opportunity to ‘tell’ their writing could have the largest direct effect on the quality of young children’s writing (Kim & Schatschneider 2017).

Find out more: 

• Young, R. Ferguson, F (2022) Developing children’s talk for writing [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2021) How important is talk for writing? [LINK]
• Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2023) Getting children up and running as writers [LINK]

3. Reading mentor texts

“Too often, schools choose texts to study in English lessons based on their link to other curriculum areas, rather than on how they might advance pupils’ knowledge of English language and understanding of literature.”

“Provide opportunities for pupils to draw on the increasingly complex models they study and encounter in their reading.”

“Some schools use high-quality models to help pupils”

✅ Ofsted are right here. We know that there is a profound link between reading and writing. Part of this reading/writing connection is giving children enough time and opportunity to read and discuss ‘mentor texts’ which actually match the kind of writing they are being expected to produce for themselves (Young & Ferguson 2023).

Find out more: 

• Young, R. Ferguson, F (2023) Reading in the writing classroom [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2023) What does the research say about reading in the writing classroom? [LINK]

4. Grammar, sentence structures and punctuation

“Schools teach grammar, sentence structure and punctuation explicitly. However, pupils do not always get enough practice to secure this knowledge.”

✅ We would agree with Ofsted here and would welcome more instructional focus on teaching grammar (Young & Ferguson 2021), sentence structures (Young & Ferguson 2022) and punctuation directly and functionally. This should also include explicitly teaching children how to proof-read (Young & Ferguson 2023). 

Find out more: 

• Young, R. Ferguson, F (2024) How to teach writing [LINK]
• Young, R., Ferguson (2023) No more: ‘My pupils can’t edit’: A whole-school approach to developing proof-readers [LINK] 
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2022) The components of an effective sentence-level lesson [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2023) The components of an effective grammar instruction [LINK]

5. Stop fundamental errors going unnoticed

“Pupils’ books show that fundamental errors go unnoticed and persist over time.”

🟠 We would partially agree with this statement. It’s true that deviations from the conventions their readers would expect to see can regularly go unnoticed in pupils’ books and we don’t want this to happen. Instead, we want teachers and schools to:

• Have a sensible written marking policy (see How To Arrange Your Written Marking in How To Teach Writing – LINK)
• Take the teaching of proof-reading seriously (see No More: ‘My Pupils Can’t Edit’: A Whole-School Approach To Developing Proof-Readers – LINK)
• Provide live verbal feedback and responsive writing teaching daily (see Pupil-Conferencing In The Writing Classroom: Powerful Feedback & Responsive Teaching That Changes Writers – LINK)

However, it’s realistic that such errors will persist over a period of time as this is part of learning. It’s also important to note that even professional writers make fundamental errors with regularity. That’s why some employ professional copy-writers/proof-readers.

6. Organise explicit handwriting and spelling instruction

“Most schools do not give pupils enough teaching and practice to gain high degrees of fluency in spelling and handwriting.”

✅ We would agree with Ofsted here. Disfluent handwriting means children can’t write down all the wonderful things they want to say. Children with poor handwriting can also have lower writerly self-esteem and can consider writing to be a strenuous and difficult activity. If children have to consciously think about their handwriting, they have less cognitive space to focus on other important aspects of quality writing. We also know that a fluent handwriting style improves other aspects of children’s writing (e.g. the quality of their compositions). Finally, and regrettably, teachers have been known to be negatively biassed towards students with poor handwriting when assessing their compositions.

Explicit handwriting instruction guidance:

• A simple and consistent script taught across the school.
• Regular instruction and deliberate practice (5 mins of instruction – 5 mins of practice is a good rule of thumb).
• Children write a small number of letters together at a time (3-5).
• Teachers give feedback and individualised instruction during practice.
• Children should also self-monitor and evaluate their attempts.
• Check children’s posture. Make sure they look comfortable when writing.
• Reiterate what’s been taught when children are publishing their ‘real’ writing.
• The focus should be on legibility, speed and stamina, not adherence to a particular style.
• Additional instruction/intervention for children who need it.

Find out more: 

• The National Handwriting Association [LINK]
• The Research On Handwriting [LINK]

Explicit spelling instruction:

It is suggested that children be exposed to a balanced approach to spelling instruction which includes teaching the following in combination and at the earliest of stages.

• Phonology – relationship between letters (graphemes) and the sounds (phonemes) they represent in spoken language.
• Morphology –  the structure and formation of words in a language, including their roots, prefixes, suffixes, and how they combine to create different meanings.
• Orthography – involves teaching children typical rules and patterns for spelling.
• Etymology – studying the origin and history of words.

Children should also be taught how to proofread for their misspelt attempted spellings.

Find out more: 

• Adoniou, M. (2014). What should teachers know about spelling?. Literacy, 48(3), 144-154 [LINK]
• Adoniou, M. (2022) Spelling It Out: How Words Work and How to Teach Them Cambridge University Press [LINK]
• The Research On Spelling [LINK]

7. Using time productively

“In some schools, time is not always used productively, most commonly in key stage 1. In these schools, pupils carry out time-filling activities that lack purpose and do not help them to make progress in English.”

🤷🏽 We don’t know if this is true. However, if this feels like it might be the case for you or your school, consider reading the following article: The components of an effective writing lesson [LINK].

8. Explicitly teaching writing

“Schools typically do not provide enough explicit teaching or opportunities for pupils to practise the knowledge and skills that are not yet secure”

✅ We would certainly agree with Ofsted here. The majority of the schools we begin working with tell us that they struggle with how to explicitly teach writing and have instead relied on their reading programmes to teach it. You may wish to read our article: Issues With The Book Planning Approach And How They Can Be Addressed for more details on this – LINK.

Find out more: 

• Young, R. Ferguson, F (2024) How to teach writing [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2022) Getting writing instruction right [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2023a) Evidence-based writing instruction for children with SEND [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2023b) Evidence-based writing instruction for 11-18 year olds [LINK]

9. Rushing class writing projects and getting rushed results

“The rush to produce extended pieces of writing independently also means that oral composition appears to be undervalued as a process.”

“Provide opportunities for pupils to write frequently for a range of purposes and audiences. Pupils also need to be taught how to plan, draft and revise their work, to reflect on the choices they make as writers.”

✅ We would certainly agree with Ofsted here. The majority of the schools we begin working with tell us that they find planning writing units very difficult and that there is a pressure for children to produce lots of writing. This makes some sense because we know children do get better at writing by writing. However, teachers also need to plan rigorous and reassuringly consistent class writing projects which give children quality time to engage and learn about all the writing processes. For more information, see the following articles:

• The components of an effective writing unit [LINK]
• Planning a class writing project with the greater-depth standard as the standard [LINK]

10. Not making the link between phonics and encoding for writing

“Pupils’ knowledge of phonics is not always considered when they are asked to read or write in other English lessons.”

✅ We would certainly agree with Ofsted here. This is something we often pick up on when working with colleagues in the EYFS and KS1. Indeed, it feels like the time is now right for Ofsted to move its focus on how phonics can help children with their early reading to focusing on how it can have a transformative impact on children’s encoding skills and their early writing development. It takes a lot of cognitive energy for children to take the phonemes of their speech and present them as graphemes of written language; otherwise called encoding. In the context of writing, phonics instruction should also focus on how to  encode and produce ‘sound spellings’ (also known as invented spellings, temporary spellings, own spellings or approximated spellings) and be orientated towards how this instruction will be relevant and useful to the class as writers during their daily writing or ‘book-making time’ (Young & Ferguson 2022). We know that when children receive phonics instruction that also encourages them to produce ‘sound spellings’ when writing for themselves, they outperform those not in receipt of such instruction on a whole variety of writing and reading measures (Rowe 2018).

❌ However, one issue with Ofsted’s report is how it insists on children being able to encode before they are allowed to write independently. This suggestion is actually developmentally inappropriate and ultimately reduces young children’s desire to write (Byington & Kim 2017; Gerade et al. 2012; Cabel et al. 2023). This shouldn’t be a recommendation made by Ofsted. Instead, they should have looked at the research around the stages of ‘emergent writing’. This research helps senior leadership teams and teachers understand how children can access writing and being a writer before they’ve learnt to formally encode (Byington & Kim 2017; Young & Ferguson 2022).  

The report also fails to mention how children’s letter formation develops through a recursive process of: drawings and scribbles; linear scribbles and mock handwriting and letter-like symbols. This then progresses to: random but real letter strings; letters that represent key sounds learnt; spaces that indicate separation between words; ‘sound spellings’ using phonics knowledge before finally spelling words conventionally. To try and somehow skip these stages would be developmentally inappropriate.

An example of the stages of emergent writing children work through

(Byington & Kim 2017)

11. Children are already ready

“Pupils who are not secure in the foundations of writing are being asked to complete tasks that they are not ready for.”

I think we can all agree that making a picturebook is a pretty complex task – just ask any professional children’s author. However, Wyatt has only just arrived in Nursery and has already made one. His school uses the Writing For Pleasure approach to teach writing (Young & Ferguson 2022). This means children learn something about writing every day and they are invited to make books every single day. It is the autumn term and this is one of the first books Wyatt has ever made:

Isn’t that a brilliant story? Wyatt is already ready to write. I should explain that Wyatt is already learning a number of things about book-making. He is learning that a book should have a picture and some emergent writing on every page. He has also learnt that when you are ‘telling’ your book – you should ‘tickle your writing’. This involves moving your finger across your emergent writing so you can tell people what it says. This is how I know what Wyatt’s book says. He was able to ‘read’ it to me – and I privately wrote down what his writing said in my notebook. 

If you find this interesting, you might like to download our eBook: Getting Children Up & Running As Writers – LINK.

12. In the writing classroom, encourage children to write about content held in their long-term memory

“To develop proficiency in writing, pupils need… knowledge of the topic they are writing about.”

✅ This is true and we agree with Ofsted. The Science Of Writing identifies content knowledge (what Ofsted call ‘topic knowledge’) as an essential cognitive resource writers need to draw from to write successfully. We know that when children are allowed to choose and access a topic they are familiar with and emotionally connected to, their writing performance improves and they produce higher quality texts (see this article for more details – LINK). This is because they access content which is already stored in their long-term memory, which then allows them to focus on what really matters – crafting the writing. There are a number of ways teachers can help children access rich content knowledge in the writing classroom:

• Explicitly teach idea generation techniques in writing lessons (Young & Ferguson 2022). Idea generation techniques ensure all children are writing using rich and extensive content knowledge.
• Invite children to write about their reading in reading lessons (Young & Ferguson 2020).
• Invite children to write about what they are learning during lessons in the wider curriculum (Young & Ferguson 2020, 2021).

13. Supporting children with SEND to be great writers

“Leaders have the same curriculum ambitions for pupils with SEND as for their peers. In the best examples, this means that curriculum end points are broken down further to give pupils more time to embed knowledge before moving on to more challenging content. Teachers make adaptations, including using further explanations. They modify resources when needed and use appropriate groupings to ensure that pupils can access the content in a suitable sequence. In the weakest examples, pupils are expected to copy from the board or from teaching assistants without fully grasping what they are writing or reading. These schools are not clear about how best to support pupils in the earliest stages of learning to read and write.”

✅ We are really pleased to see Ofsted highlight some evidence-based practices that support children with SEND to develop as great writers. We are also pleased that they highlighted what not to do. Namely, asking children to copy from the board or have a teaching assistant undertake the writing on children’s behalf. 

Find out more:

• Young, R., Ferguson, F. (2023) Supporting children with SEND to be great writers: A guide for teachers and SENCOS [LINK]
• Young, R. Ferguson, F. (2023a) Evidence-based writing instruction for children with SEND [LINK]

14. Well done, that school!

“How one primary school went about developing their writing curriculum. Leaders had carefully identified the stages pupils needed to go through to develop their transcription skills. They started with encoding, the reversible aspect of phonics, which pupils practised to fluency. As pupils developed proficiency in writing captions and simple sentences, leaders took a stepped approach to introducing them to different types of sentence structures and grammatical conventions. Pupils were again given the time to practise these before starting to experiment further with the structures. Teachers modelled the component parts, first at word, then sentence, then paragraph level, before moving on to whole text composition later. Although leaders made sure that pupils were introduced to increasingly complex texts for their reading curriculum, they had decided to focus on building secure foundational knowledge and skills in writing. Oral composition continued to play a significant role in English beyond Reception, ensuring that pupils could create complex narratives verbally. Pupils were not rushed into composing complex written compositions before they were ready.”

✅ We were delighted to see such a sensible approach taken to developing children’s early writing. This reflects the recommendations we make to our Writing For Pleasure schools. First, we ask teachers to focus their instructional attention on encouraging children’s emergent writing practices and move onto teaching encoding strategies once their phonics programme is introduced. Children quickly realise that all this instruction is there to serve their daily opportunities to make books. They use and apply their foundational knowledge to make and share meaning with, and for, others. This way, children’s compositional and transcriptional knowledge develops concurrently. 

Once encoding is well-established, children start making what we call ‘list books’. These are simple books which match the ‘baby’ or ‘board’ books they should have read prior to coming to school. These list books encourage children to write captions, single words, and/or short phrases. Once children begin to outgrow these projects, teachers move the children onto writing simple picturebooks – with the expectation that children write a single sentence on each page. Children then very naturally move beyond this – writing multiple sentences. Finally, children migrate to making ‘chapter books’ where they write a paragraph or ‘chunk’ of text on each page. 

If this sounds interesting to you, and you would like to find out more, download our eBook Getting Children Up & Running As Writers: Lessons For EYFS-KS1 Teachers [LINK].

Summary

What we are really pleased about:

✅ The need to teach writing explicitly is put front and centre in the report [LINK].

✅ There is a focus on developing children’s writing fluency [LINK].

✅ Reiterates the point that phonics instruction should serve children as encoders as well as decoders [LINK].

✅ Oral language development is highlighted as a significant factor in children’s writing success [LINK].

✅ The importance of reading mentor texts is emphasised [LINK].

✅ Teaching grammar and sentence-structures functionally is reiterated [LINK], [LINK], [LINK].

✅ The need for short but regular handwriting and spelling instruction is acknowledged [LINK], [LINK].

✅ The suggestion to stop rushing class writing projects is welcomed [LINK].

✅ Acknowledges that when children can write on topics they are knowledgeable and passionate about, they can focus their attention on producing quality writing [LINK].

✅ Highlights the need to employ evidence-based writing practices for children with SEND [LINK].

✅ Showcases how schools need to have a clear progression for writing development in the EYFS through to the end of KS1 [LINK].

What we are less than thrilled about:

❌ Suggesting that foundational knowledge needs to be somehow mastered before children should be given ‘the right to write’ [LINK].

❌ Not mentioning the importance of accepting and building on children’s emergent writing practices when they first come to school [LINK].

❌ Not accepting that making errors is a part of learning to write.

We’re delighted to announce that we’re collaborating with HFL Education and UK Literacy Association’s School Of The Year Elmhurst Primary School to bring you our new training: Getting Writing Right: What the Evidence Says.

Join us for a day of learning!

About this course

Held at Elmhurst Primary School in London, this training will equip teachers and leaders to understand what the latest evidence and research concerning quality writing teaching is.   

The day will consider how schools can ensure that all children make maximised progress in writing.  The essential features of writing teaching will be discussed, such as: 

• How to set rigorous writing goals
• How to plan a class writing project with the greater-depth standard as the standard
• What’s involved in delivering an effective writing lesson
• How to deliver sentence-level and grammar instruction
• How to connect reading and writing profitably.

Learning Outcomes

• Have a secure understanding of what the evidence and research says around effective writing teaching
• Be given practical ideas and strategies for writing teaching to use in the primary classroom immediately
• Be equipped with greater confidence and subject knowledge concerning the teaching of writing

Additional Information

Lunch & refreshments will be provided.

Schools will also receive a school license (worth £54.75) for our latest eBook How To Teach Writing.

Why teach this unit?

This is a wonderfully versatile project and one you can use time and again. This is because children simply change what it is they want to put at the end of this title stem: A story about… my dad, A story about… my friend Charlie, A story about… Spiderman, A story about… the Gruffalo, or even A story about… Monty the monstertruck! 

Children love telling others stories about the people they know and like outside school. They may have overheard or been told a funny or a serious anecdote about someone, or perhaps remember something they did together, and this is a great opportunity to entertain or inform others about it, make a record of something to look back on, and maybe also to express affection for someone or something important to them. Making a book about someone who belongs to the wider circle of family friends and acquaintances offers children extra possibilities for making links between home and school and for writing about what they know (Young et al. 2022). For this reason, their book may contain elements of both personal narrative (memoir) and information.

Alternatively, this project is an opportunity for children to write their own ‘fan fiction’ by taking a character from their popular culture and using them in their own story. This helps introduce children to the idea of intertextuality – that your stories can be based on others you know or love (Young & Ferguson 2023).

In every story there hides a hundred other stories

Why teach this unit?

The beauty of this unit is that it works with any high-quality text or any set of books your pupils love. If we want reading to raise the quality of children’s writing, we should give them the choice over the books they might want to take from in their writing. It’s important that we teach writing and reading in a connected way and so show children how all writers will use their favourite literature and other reading to influence their writing (Young & Ferguson 2023). When writers do this, it’s called intertextuality. 

Intertextuality is the idea that writing (and therefore writers) will be influenced or inspired by things read, watched or heard. We must first let our young apprentice writers know that this is an utterly natural thing for writers to do and then encourage them to do it for themselves. 

Children don’t only show their comprehension when they write in response to the books they’re reading; they give something of themselves to the text too. A fair exchange of ideas is made between the reader and what’s read. When this happens, we believe it’s evidence of children achieving the greater-depth standard.

We are delighted to announce the publication of our latest book: How To Teach Writing.

How To Teach Writing is a collection of articles that are designed to slowly guide you through the principles and practices of world-class writing teaching. 

Importantly, we cover quality writing teaching from the EYFS-KS2. It doesn’t matter what writing approach you use, you’ll find any of our articles useful. You can pick and choose the articles that you think will be most helpful and interesting to you and which best fit your particular context. We’ve made sure that each article can stand alone. In this way, they are perfect for staff meetings. They allow you to focus on areas of writing teaching that matter most to your school.

If you’re planning to introduce our whole approach into your classroom or school then we can recommend reading the articles in the order we’ve organised them. By the end, you’ll be well placed to deliver world-class evidenced-based writing teaching. Exciting!

Above all, we wanted these articles to be short, engaging and utterly practical. We want you to feel like a better writing teacher after reading them and enacting the advice that’s shared. 

• Part 1 is designed to give you a really good grounding in what the research says about delivering evidence-based writing teaching for EYFS, KS1 and KS2. It also shares the research around ensuring a good connection between reading and writing. Finally, we share best practice when it comes to working with children with SEND.
• Part 2 helps you know how to plan successful units and individual writing lessons. 
• Part 3 gives short practical advice on a whole host of important writerly topics. Hopefully, you’ve browsed our contents page to see just how much is covered!

Individual license – £10.95

School/Institution license – £54.75

or FREE for members

Biography is history seen through the prism of a person – Louis Fischer

Why teach biography?

This writing project will show children how they can document the lives of people in their communities. They will discover how the lives of ordinary people they know can be sources of great historical, social and personal interest – not only to themselves as the writer but to others too. All people’s lives are interesting, but we don’t always realise it ourselves. Everyone in our society has a story to tell, and by asking the right questions and sharing these stories publicly, children learn that they can give a voice to those people who would never otherwise have had an audience.

Biography writing has strong elements of memoir, although it will be about other people that the writer knows personally or has heard of through family members, friends or the community. At their very best, biographies can carry within them great opportunities for poetic description and rich anecdote. One of the great benefits of this writing project is that the writer can bring in and celebrate stories that can strengthen and enhance the sense of community and connection inside the classroom (Young et al. 2022). There may well be gains, too, for the person being interviewed and written about.

A good biography topic creates the possibility for reflection, empathy or a shared understanding of a person or an experience. Children will come to understand the role biographers have in documenting and preserving people’s past.

We are delighted to announce the publication of our latest book: How To Teach Writing.

In How To Teach Writing, Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson present thirty essential articles which will revolutionise any EYFS-KS2 classroom. From the authors who transformed their own ineffective writing teaching, this guide delivers actionable strategies and evidence-based practices.

Discover the 14 principles of world-class writing teaching, learn about the reading/writing connection, understand how to support children with SEND, and unpick what assessment statements are really asking. 

This book is also packed with some amazing ‘How to…‘ guides including: 

• How to plan an effective writing lesson
• How to plan a purposeful and effective writing unit
• How to deliver an effective grammar and sentence-level lesson
• How to do effective modelled and shared writing
• How to teach children to read as writers
• How to help children generate great writing ideas
• How to help children plan their writing
• How to help children revise 
• How to help children proof-read their writing
• How to establish success criteria effectively
• How to give effective verbal feedback
• How to arrange your written marking
• How to assess pupils’ writing
• How to develop children’s oral language and vocabulary use in the writing classroom
• How to use focus groups when teaching writing
• How to set up personal writing projects

This book is the key to achieving great results whilst also fostering a love of writing. It’s time to redefine your writing teaching. Start your journey today.

Individual license – £10.95

School/Institution license – £54.75

or FREE for members