Writing

Intent

At Great Sankey Primary we value the importance of language and aim to develop children to become independent, confident and inspirational writers. Writing is an important focus at Great Sankey Primary School and we ensure it is incorporated across the whole curriculum. We aim to provide a purpose for writing and make topics engaging, fun and inspirational for all the children at GSP. We recognise the importance that reading plays in producing proficient writers: children who experience stories and regularly read good, quality texts are more likely to be competent and skilful writers. Children are encouraged to write to the best of their ability and taught to independently improve and edit their own and others’ work.

Implementation

English is a core subject and the school follows the statutory requirements for the teaching and learning of writing as laid out in the National Curriculum (2014).  

Writing begins by encouraging children to ‘mark make’, which teaches the fundamental basics of forming letters. Children then progress onto forming letters, words, phrases, sentences and then paragraphs. Children are taught genre-specific skills (for example, how to write a letter), which are driven by a quality age-appropriate text, film clip or experience. Vocabulary, grammar and punctuation is mainly taught in the context of the English lesson as this enables the child to apply this knowledge to their independent writing. Stand–alone grammar and punctuation sessions are also delivered during core skills / retrieval sessions where appropriate.

Throughout school, writing is celebrated in many ways: through children's work being displayed, through it being shared with other staff including Mr Gawne and Mrs Wilding and through children being praised for their efforts in writing . Every class contains a WAGOLL model (What a Good One Looks Like) to help children understand expectations as well as an English working wall where useful resources for writing are displayed so that children can independently access them to use in their own writing. 

The school follows the accredited scheme 'Pathways to Write' which is a high quality writing scheme linked closely to high quality picture books and texts. Staff also plan from a range of other texts thats we have used to inspire different writing outcomes.

Impact

In our school, we have a community of enthusiastic writers who enjoy the opportunity to write across the curriculum, as a result of the strong emphasis we place upon reading and communication skills. We have a broad range of high quality texts to inspire children's writing and have talented staff who inspire children to be creative.

Writing is assessed each half term against National Curriculum expectations and the judgements made are frequently moderated within school and across the Trust. In Years 2 and 6, these judgements are submitted to the Government as part of the Standard Assessment Tests (SATs).

We are very proud of the writing that children produce in our school and are equally proud of our writing data. Across both Key Stage 1 and 2, our writing data continues to be above the National Average for children meeting both the expected and higher standards.