Writing 

Intent

Through their writing, pupils have the opportunity to develop culturally, emotionally, intellectually, socially and spiritually. At St. Mary’s we pride ourselves in offering high-quality education that enable pupils to acquire knowledge and to build on what they already know.

Through the English curriculum children will

• acquire a wide vocabulary, an understanding of grammar and knowledge of linguistic conventions for reading, writing and spoken language
• appreciate our rich and varied literary heritage
• write clearly, accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style in and for a range of contexts, purposes and audiences
• use discussion in order to learn; they should be able to elaborate and explain clearly their understanding and ideas
• are competent in the arts of speaking and listening, making formal presentations, demonstrating to others and participating in debate
• See themselves as real writers

Implementation

Writing is a part of everything a child does in school. Our whole school curriculum depends on pupils being able to write. Teachers ensure children have every opportunity to achieve this goal.

All pupils will have an equality of access to a broad and balanced English curriculum irrespective of gender, ethnicity or special educational needs.

Pupils will be move through the programmes of study at broadly the same pace. However, decisions about when to progress should always be based on the security of pupils’ understanding and their readiness to progress to the next stage.

Pupils who grasp the key features of a writing genre rapidly, should be challenged through being offered more challenging writing tasks before any acceleration through new content.

Strategies to Ensure progress and Continuity:

• Long term, medium term and short term planning shows progress in knowledge, skills and understanding and ensures the continuity of and development of a range of writing genres.
• Children’s writing development will be evaluated on an ongoing basis by the teacher / teaching assistant and / or child, which ultimately informs the planning of future writing tasks.
• There are focused writing intervention sessions throughout the key stages, for specific groups of children in order for every child to reach their potential.

We will ensure that in any key stage the national curriculum for Writing reflects the importance of spoken language in pupils’ development across the whole curriculum – cognitively, socially and linguistically. The quality and variety of language that pupils hear and speak are key factors in developing their written vocabulary. Pupils are assisted in making their thinking clear to themselves as well as others and teachers should ensure that pupils build secure foundations by using discussion to develop their thinking and understanding of a range of written texts.

Impact

Teachers will make summative assessments of the attainment and progress made by pupils towards the key skills, a level of beginning, working at and secure will then be recorded at 3 different assessment points across the academic year. This will then inform the assessment shown on each child’s end of year report.  In Reception, Year 2 and Year 6, the children will be assessed by the Frameworks set out by the DFE and will be graded according to their criteria.