The Department for Education’s Writing Framework arrived in July with an ambitious promise: to set out a clear, ‘evidence-based’ progression for developing children’s writing from Reception onwards. But like any government guidance, it embodies particular beliefs about:
- What writing is
- Why we teach it
- How it should be learnt
This article reads the Framework through two complementary analytical lenses. The first is Roz Ivanić’s Discourses of Writing and Learning to Write, which distinguishes six overlapping ‘discourses’ for teaching writing: skills, creativity, process, genre, social practices, and sociopolitical. Each privileges certain values, pedagogies and learner identities.
The second is Richard Fulkerson’s Four Philosophies of Composition: formalist, expressivist, mimetic/cognitive, and rhetorical. These reveal competing priorities in how writing quality is defined, taught and then assessed.
By mapping the DfE’s guidance against these models, we can see where it offers a healthy balance of perspectives and where it risks narrowing the scope of writing pedagogy. The goal here is not to dismiss the Framework, but to interrogate it in the light of two well-established scholarly frameworks, and to suggest how schools might adapt its strengths while addressing its blind spots.
Discourses of writing and learning to write
1. Skills discourse
- What Ivanić means: writing = a set of discrete technical competencies (handwriting, spelling, grammar) taught explicitly and assessed for correctness.
- Where DfE aligns: The Framework foregrounds transcription (handwriting, spelling) and sentence-level accuracy from Reception onward — explicit step‑by‑step teaching of sentence structure is made central. There is a clear skills emphasis.
- Critique: The DfE does this well as far as ensuring technical competence (which is vital). But if the skills discourse dominates policy and classroom practice, Ivanić would warn that other discourses (creativity, social practices) may be crowded out, leading to writing that’s technically correct but thin in meaning, purpose, or voice.
- Practical suggestion: Keep the explicit skills sequences, but embed them in tasks where accuracy serves a meaningful communicative aim (see genre + rhetorical tasks below).
2. Creativity (expressivist) discourse
- What Ivanić means: writing as personal expression, voice and creativity; assessment values content and style.
- Where DfE aligns/doesn’t: The Framework mentions motivation and a ‘love of writing’ and encourages children to write on meaningful topics, but the practical guidance and curricula examples are dominated by sentence- and transcription-focused sequences. Motivation is discussed, yet creative, exploratory writing gets much less space in the guidance.
- Critique: Ivanić would argue the Framework only gestures to creativity but does not operationalise it strongly — few classroom examples show how to balance expressivist tasks with the heavy emphasis on automaticity and timed progression.
- Build in early-and-regular time for sustained personal passion projects so children grow as writers, not just as technicians who produce writing to order.
3. Process discourse
- What Ivanić means: focus on composition stages (reading as writers, generating ideas, planning, drafting, revising, editing, publishing/performing) and strategies for developing compositional competence.
- Where DfE aligns: The Framework explicitly sets out the writing processes and scaffolding for them, noting developmentally appropriate uses (e.g. oral composition as a strategy to support writing in Reception; fuller drafting in KS2).
- Critique: There is good alignment here. The Framework provides practical descriptions. Ivanić would still press: whose process is being modelled? Much of the process guidance is teacher-led scaffolding (shared/modelled writing). There’s less on students developing metacognitive control of their own composing strategies across genre and contexts.
- Practical suggestion: Add explicit classroom routines for students’ self-monitoring of goals (e.g. co-constructed ‘author’s checklists’ that combine meaning and mechanics), and make reflection on the writing process an assessed learning outcome.
4. Genre discourse
- What Ivanić means: writing using knowledge of text types, audience expectations and conventional structures; pedagogy focuses on familiarising pupils with different genres and their typical features.
- Where DfE aligns: The Framework requires modelling and the study of mentor texts. Appendix H/G provides models and strategies for reader awareness and structure. It explicitly states that pupils should write for a range of purposes and to a variety of audiences.
- Critique: The Framework provides guidance on using mentor texts, but the genre approach in Ivanić’s sense must foreground social purposes and rhetorical craft moves — not only the structure of different texts. The document advises studying mentor texts, but implementation guidance could be stronger on linking genre features to social purpose and background knowledge (see Young & Ferguson 2024 for more on this).
- Practical suggestion: Make genre teaching more explicitly socio‑rhetorical: when teaching, always align the genre features you see in mentor texts to the needs of real audiences, contexts and constraints (writing fairytales for the younger pupils, creating a school magazine to raise money for charity, creating class anthology of knowledge for the local library).
5. Social practices discourse
- What Ivanić means: writing is a social activity – making writing depends on community conventions and purposes; writers’ identities are constructed and developed by participation in these practices.
- Where DfE aligns/doesn’t: The Framework touches on cross‑curricular writing and recommends writing about known funds-of-knowledge, but explicit attention to writing as social practice in children’s communities (family genres, local literacies, translanguaging, producing dual-language writing, and multimodal publishing) is limited.
- Critique: Ivanić would note a missed opportunity: the DfE’s strong technical progression could be enriched by foregrounding a wider ecology of writing practices (online, multimodal, real‑world local community purposes and publishing) that make writing real and socially meaningful.
- Practical suggestion: Plan class writing projects and study mentor texts built around real audiences (local zines and newsletters, letters to local councillors and businesses, collaborative multimodal projects) and guidance on assessing the effectiveness of the writing once it enters the public domain.
6. Sociopolitical discourse
- Ivanić’s point is that writing is political. Curricula should therefore address the rhetorical power of writing, explaining how it can represent, advocate, or marginalise, and recognising it as a form of identity. Writing can be used to reproduce or to resist social inequalities (see our Writing Realities framework for more).
- Where DfE aligns/doesn’t: The Framework briefly discusses representation (the Curriculum Review’s aim to reflect diversities) but gives no concrete classroom-level guidance on critical literacy, whose voices are being shared in mentor texts, and how to engage students with texts that interrogate power, bias or identity.
- Critique: From Ivanić’s perspective, the Framework has not provided tools for teachers to make writing instruction equity‑conscious (e.g. choosing mentor texts, support for emerging-multilingual writers, and assessment practices that recognise diverse rhetorical norms).
- Practical suggestion: Add guidance on inclusive mentor-text selection, multilingual approaches (valuing students’ home languages as resources for writing), and tasks that invite students to write about community issues, argumentation, and civic purposes.
The DfE document is strongly rooted in the skills and process discourses (which are necessary). But an Ivanić-style analytic lens would urge a deliberate re-integration of the creativity, social‑practice and sociopolitical discourses: do not let technical mastery become an end in itself; treat technical teaching as serving communicative, personal, identity-forming, and civic ends.
The four philosophies of teaching composition
Fulkerson sets out four broad, competing philosophies that tend to structure curricula and classroom priorities:
- Formalist – accuracy and adherence to conventions
- Expressivist – writer’s self‑discovery and developing voice
- Mimetic/Cognitive – writing as reflection of correct thinking and showing understanding of taught knowledge
- Rhetorical – writing to achieve an effect on an audience.
Fulkerson argues that policy/practice often slides into privileging one philosophy and losing sight of ends.
1. Formalist
- Good writing should be judged on formal correctness and the use of conventions (punctuation, spelling, mechanics).
- DfE alignment: Very strong. The Framework pushes for explicit handwriting, spelling and sentence-level instruction. The leadership/assessment guidance also makes correctness central.
- Critique: Formalist attention is necessary but when formalist aims dominate policy rhetoric and curriculum time, writing risks becoming an exercise in superficial and surface correctness and becomes detached from sharing-meaning and rhetorical purpose.
- Practical suggestion: Retain formalist sequences but ensure assessment and classroom time also reward rhetorical effectiveness and meaningful content; don’t let transcriptional accuracy become the sole gatekeeper of writing success.
2. Expressivist
- Writing is an act of self-expression and discovery. What’s known as a writer-centered pedagogy.
- DfE alignment: Partial. The Framework does explicitly reference motivation, ‘love of writing’, and personal passion project opportunities but offers limited concrete curriculum time or examples that centre voice or exploratory writing.
- Critique: The Framework pays lip service to expressivist aims but prioritises measurable, teachable outcomes over the space and risk-taking that voice-centered pedagogy requires.
- Practical suggestion: Schedule regular, sustained and protected time for personal passion projects, portfolio development and writing journals; assess some of these pieces for voice, originality, and idea development, not just technical accuracy.
3. Mimetic/Cognitive
- Good writing is good thinking; composition instruction should cultivate reasoning and knowledge-building/knowledge-sharing.
- DfE alignment: The DfE links writing to thinking and recommends planning, research, and writing about familiar topics.
- Critique: The Framework recognises the writing → thinking relationship, but this could be pushed further: class writing projects should be constructed explicitly as thinking tasks (e.g. inquiry cycles, producing anthologies of learning, essay writing across the curriculum and crafting creative non-fiction ‘faction’). Teachers should also teach cognitive strategies for composition (see LINK and LINK for more details).
- Practical suggestion: Integrate explicit writing instruction into wider-curriculum subjects (how historians/ scientists/ geographers share their knowledge with others) so writing becomes a tool for thinking, not just a product to be assessed.
4. Rhetorical
- Writing should be judged by its effectiveness in giving the audience what they want or need. This involves studying mentor texts and audience analysis.
- DfE alignment: The Framework contains a section on establishing audience/purpose and using mentor texts (see Appendix G). It gives some practical advice about ‘writing as a reader’ and ‘reading as a writer’ and tailoring your writing to suit your audiences’ needs.
- Critique: There is much to like about this aspect of the Framework. However, children should write for authentic purposes (not pseudo-authentic situations) and for a variety of audiences. Assessment should focus on their audiences’ reactions to their manuscripts and how they dealt with and negotiated audience constraints.
- Practical suggestion: Plan authentic class writing projects where there is a real audience receiving the manuscripts at the end. Co-construct success criteria with the children after reading a variety of mentor texts. This criteria can be used to judge the impact the writing had (audience uptake, clarity of purpose, appropriateness of style) alongside transcriptional accuracy.
The DfE strongly favours a Formalist approach with healthy Process/Mimetic touches and some Rhetorical Awareness. However, Fulkerson would warn the DfE against “policy mindlessness” – aligning their means (heavy focus on transcription drills) without constantly revisiting their own ends (wanting children to write for a variety of purposes and audience; to engage in personal expression; to understand the writing processes; to develop a love for writing).
Cross‑cutting recommendations (Ivanić + Fulkerson combined)
- Explicitly balance discourses/philosophies in planning templates. When schools adopt writing schemes or are producing long-term planning, require a short annotation: which discourses and philosophies are being served by each unit (e.g., Unit X = Formalist + Rhetorical; Unit Y = Expressivist + Process).
- Make mentor text selection & assessment more inclusive and social‑practice aware. Appendices (C & G) are good starting points; extend them with diverse community genres and assessment procedures which reward rhetorical success and identity work as well as correctness.
- Increase teacher CPD on rhetorical and sociopolitical aspects. Teachers deserve practical advice (how to find and study high-quality mentor texts; identifying and sourcing audiences for children’s writing; how to set up personal writing projects; disciplinary-based writing) to operationalise the social practices and rhetorical discourses.
- Protect curriculum time for personal passion project writing. To develop children’s intrinsic motivation and develop voice, schools should be encouraged to schedule personal passion project time. This prevents the skills agenda from crowding out children’s expressivist development.
- Assessment: develop multi-dimensional rubrics. Combine transcriptional accuracy, rhetorical effectiveness, cognitive thinking and process, and evidence of identity development and voice into any new assessment system. This signals to teachers and pupils that correctness serves meaning and purpose.
Concluding thoughts
The DfE’s Writing Framework gives schools a strong structural backbone for developing transcriptional skill and process awareness. However, read through Ivanić’s and Fulkerson’s lenses, it also reveals clear opportunities to broaden the vision: to place equal value on creativity, authentic audience engagement, social connection, and the development of writerly identity. The good news is that these elements need not compete. They can and should co-exist, each enriching the others. By intentionally balancing the discourses and philosophies in the revised framework, the DfE can ensure children leave school not only as competent technicians of written language, but as confident, purposeful, and socially aware writers. That is an outcome worth writing towards.