At St Helena’s C of E Primary School, our writing curriculum is inspiring and creative unlocking potential in all. Our curriculum seeks to ensure that all pupils flourish through challenge, support and a broad and balanced curriculum rooted in shared values and consistently high expectations while striving for excellence.

At St Helena’s C of E Primary School, from EYFS to year six, our children are provided with a range of opportunities across the curriculum to develop their writing. We want all pupils to leave Key Stage 2 as confident and willing writers. Our ambitious writing curriculum is designed to inspire pupils using high-quality texts and engaging stimuli; this allows us to relate each text type to real life examples and understand the writer’s journey. Our consistently high expectations ensure that, through challenge and support, all pupils will gain a coherent understanding and knowledge of the composition and transcription components of the writing curriculum. Through our cohesively planned and progressive curriculum, pupils are equipped with the ability to control their writing consciously and effectively, writing for a range of purposes and audiences. Through our writing curriculum, we strive to achieve excellence for all.

Our writing curriculum is implemented through a text-based approach to inspire and engage our pupils. Rooted in the foundations of reading, all pupils engage with a wide variety of high-quality texts, including fiction, non-fiction, and poetry. Our writing curriculum is progressive in skills and knowledge with transcription components of grammar, spelling and punctuation underpinning topics, which is subsequently built upon through units and year groups. Writing is given purpose and meaningful context.

• Teachers plan a sequential journey of learning.
• At the beginning of writing units, pupils engage with the text they are working with, exploring the text, sentence, and word features.
• Pupils explore the texts as readers and writers, and through engaging activities that help them familiarise themselves with the text and language features.
• The shared writing approach shows the pupils how to craft their writing, this supports them to write in the same style.
• The use of high-quality engaging texts enables children to read and write independently for a variety of audiences and purposes within writing and across the curriculum.
• Vulnerable groups of learners are supported through appropriate support and scaffolding to ensure the needs of all learners are met.
• Working walls and modelled examples reflect the learning journey of the class, highlighting key vocabulary, sentence structures, cohesive devices and writing toolkits.
• Children are exposed to new and challenging high-level vocabulary through pre-teaching so that they can develop the use of this in their writing.
• Encoding and spelling are crucial transcriptional skills that are highly prioritised within our writing curriculum.
• ‘Read Write Inc’ is our chosen systematic synthetic phonics programme. As part of this, all children in Reception and Year 1 have daily phonics sessions in small groups where they participate in speaking, listening, and spelling activities that are matched to their developing needs.
• In Years 2 to 6, daily spelling sessions take place on weekly rules/spelling patterns using the Active Spelling approach (developed by L.E.A.D Teaching School Hub). This approach is rooted in current research and has been implemented across school.
• Sessions are ambitious and engaging, with strategies to help pupils learn and apply spelling rules in their writing.
• Grammatical knowledge and skills underpin all learning in writing.
• Grammar objectives are taught through discrete sessions.
• Key learning is identified from termly assessed pieces of writing and tailored to meet the needs of the whole class and individuals.
• Pupils are given multiple opportunities to apply their knowledge and skills through composition and reflect on the impact of different word classes and grammatical structures.
• Handwriting is taught and carefully modelled throughout the school from EYFS to year 6.
• Handwriting is prioritised from the first letter that pupils begin to form, teaching letters in a logical way, focusing on letter group families.
• Our consistently high expectations ensure that, through challenge and support, all pupils will be able to write legibly and with automaticity.
• We recognise that developing transcriptional skills is paramount in enabling pupils to record their compositions.

As a Year 6 writer transitioning into secondary school, we aspire that pupils not only achieve the age-appropriate standard at the end of Key Stage 2, but are also enabled to:

• Write with confidence, clarity, and imagination.
• Understand and apply their knowledge of phonics, grammar and spelling accurately.
• Understand how to write for a range of purposes and audience, in a range of genres (including fiction, non-fiction and poetry), using the appropriate style, structure and features.
• Plan, draft, revise, edit, share, and publish their own work.
• Develop their imagination, creativity, expressive language, and critical awareness.
• Write for pleasure.