Writing

“The idea is to write it so that people hear it and it slides through the brain and goes straight to the heart.”

Maya Angelou

We believe every child is a writer. Our writing curriculum is designed to empower children with the tools, confidence, and creativity to express themselves effectively and purposefully. It is underpinned by high-quality texts and a strong emphasis on oracy, explicit vocabulary instruction, and sentence-level teaching, ensuring that children develop both the technical and expressive aspects of writing.

Foundational Knowledge First

We prioritise foundational knowledge in the Early Years and Key Stage One. This includes the development of early language through a dialogic approach, where children engage deeply with high-quality texts through talk, questioning, and shared storytelling. Alongside this, we focus on transcriptional development. We support children to master handwriting, spelling, and sentence construction ensuring we lay the groundwork for confident, fluent writing.

These early stages nurture oral storytelling, sentence-level fluency, and the foundational skills needed to produce meaningful pieces of writing ensuring children to feel confident and proud of their outcomes. As children move into Key Stage Two, the curriculum builds cumulatively towards more sophisticated composition, editing, and independent writing.

Curriculum Design

Each unit follows a carefully sequenced structure that includes:

• Hook and Purpose: Engaging openings that spark curiosity and establish a clear purpose for writing.
• Reading as Readers and Writers: Multiple readings of a high-quality text to explore vocabulary, structure, and authorial intent.
• Writer’s Toolkits: Co-constructed with children to identify and apply key features of effective writing, such as sentence types, figurative language, and punctuation.
• Sentence-Level Instruction: Regular opportunities to practise sentence construction using the “I do, we do, you do” model, tailored to year group expectations.
• Planning and Innovation: Children plan their own versions of texts using story mountains or boxing-up techniques, supported by vocabulary and sentence ideas.
• Drafting, Evaluating, and Revising: Pupils write collaboratively and independently, with regular opportunities to reflect, improve, and refine their work.
• Editing and Publishing: Final pieces are edited using our “Every Time We Write” checklist and celebrated through publishing where appropriate.

 Writing with purpose is central to our curriculum. Children learn to write with intent—whether to entertain, persuade, inform, or debate—by making thoughtful choices about language, structure, and tone. Our curriculum is designed to equip every child with the skills and knowledge to communicate effectively and meaningfully, helping them understand how their words can influence, inspire, and connect with others.