At Stockton on the Forest, our intention is that pupils view writing as enjoyable and useful.

We emphasise the importance of high expectations and the need for teachers and leaders to be ambitious for ALL pupils to ensure they get the best possible opportunity to achieve in writing.

We intend to meet the National Curriculum's aim that “by the end of Year 6 pupils' reading and writing should be sufficiently fluent and effortless for them to manage the general demands of the curriculum in Year 7 across all subjects and not just English.”

High quality teaching is central to ensuring ALL children get the best possible opportunity to achieve in writing including those with more complex needs who should also receive and be included in writing instruction.

Pupils should be able to articulate their writing intention and demonstrate the writing process by:

• Understanding and producing writing for a range of purposes, audiences and forms.
• Acquiring the ability to plan and organise their writing.
• Drafting their writing.
• Editing and improving their writing.
• Producing published work where appropriate

Teachers carefully plan out the writing tasks to be covered each term, ensuring that a range of purposes, audience and forms are practised. They use published books, film clips, objects and enrichment opportunities to hook pupils into writing. Opportunities  include a wide range of fiction, non-fiction and poetry. 

We follow a 2-3 week writing sequence: 

HOOK - initial capture of pupils' interest to stimulate curiosity and connect them to the subject matter of the writing unit.

IMMERSE - ensuring the children deeply understand the topic they will be writing about, engage with it and explore it through rich experiences.

DEEP DIVE - explicit teaching of the features of the genre / form and grammatical concepts or sentence structures that are relevant to the form / genre.

MODELLING & COLLABORATION - teacher modelling and providing opportunities for pupils to articulate their ideas, refine their language choices and develop skills through peer interaction and feedback. 

INDEPENDENCE - pupils work on their individual drafts, applying the genre features, vocabulary, and grammatical skills taught throughout the unit.

Pupils are given opportunities throughout the unit to evaluate the effectiveness of their writing by holding discussions with their teachers and their peers, making changes and improvements to their ideas and drafts as they go. 

We purposefully teach Tier 2 and 3 vocabulary across the curriculum to ensure children are equipped to make ambitious and precise word choices in their writing. 

We practise handwriting daily across school at the beginning of our writing lessons. You can find the handwriting progression map in our writing progression document below.

We also engage in daily dictation in all class. This gives the children opportunities to practise writing high quality, ambitious sentences and to practise the skills of handwriting, spelling and using punctuation with a reduced cognitive load.