Intent

At Rounds Green Primary School, we intend for our children to leave Year 6 as confident, capable, independent writers who not only understand the purpose and importance of writing within wider society but they also positively engage in the process. We intend them to leave our school with all of the writerly skills necessary to thrive within Key Stage 3 and beyond. We intend for our children to be able to communicate and express themselves effectively through the written word across both fiction and non-fiction; including being able to write for a range of purposes and audiences. We intend for our curriculum to cultivate an enhanced sense of autonomy and authorship in the young whilst being inclusive and enriching.

We intend for our children to take risks when writing; seeking to be original and creative as well as critical and reflective. We want our children to draw upon a rich exposure to quality literature so that throughout the writing process they can write as a reader and read as a writer, thus acquiring more ideas to manipulate and apply.

Throughout their time at Rounds Green Primary School, we intend our children to be exposed to a rice and enjoyable curriculum which covers a range of: plot patterns, text types, composition foci and genres for them to not only grow as writers but also develop culturally, emotionally and socially.

The aim of our writing curriculum is to promote and attain the highest standards of writing to enable children to be effective communicators in both fiction and non-fiction. We aim for the children to be able to:

• Write fluently and accurately for a range of purposes and audiences across a variety of genres and text types
• Take risks in order to create original, effective and creative pieces
• Select their words carefully to create a given effect
• Employ a wide, but effective range, of vocabulary in both fiction and non-fiction
• Understand the importance of reading on their writing
• Learn from other high-quality authors and use this to influence their own writing
• Understand the role of writing on their lives and wider society
• Engage in discussion in order to learn, deepen their thinking and form opinions
• Choose what they want to write, who they want to write it for and what form it will take.
• Identify themselves as writers, understand their rights as writers and their authorial intentions.
• Enjoy and be enriched by the curriculum.

Implementation

At Rounds Green Primary School, we have designed our writing curriculum around the two core strands of transcription and composition. We have implemented systems and comprehensive overviews to ensure that learning is progressive and cumulative.

Transcription

We use the following methodologies for the transcriptional aspects of writing throughout the school:

• Handwriting                                                  Kinetic Letters
• Phonics and Spelling                                   Little Wandle and No Nonsense Spelling
• ​​​​Grammar                                                      An adaptation of the Pie Corbett Grammar                                                                                                  Progression Document           

Composition

At Rounds Green Primary School, we use the Talk for Writing (TfW) approach across our school as our methodology to teach children to become independent, confident and creative writers. Talk for Writing is effective because is based on how children learn and is rooted in research and best practice. The inclusive approach moves children systematically and supportively from being a dependent writer through to an independent writer. Oracy and reading are central to the TfW process and it equips children with the skills of cohesion and composition. Talk for Writing also supports children with English as an Additional Language by immersing them in our language and scaffolding the acquisition of it.

The strategies that teachers explicitly teach through the Talk for Writing process are:

1. Modelling

2. Selecting, judging and applying linguistic devices and words for effect.

3. Demonstrating

4. Evaluating

5. Memorising

6. Instructing

7. Recall/revising

8. Innovating – manipulating what they know to create something new  

Impact

By the time the children reach the end of our writing curriculum, they will have experienced a rich variety of the finest literature, will have written in a range of text types and for a variety of different audiences and purposes. The impact of the curriculum will be that they become an effective communicator through the medium of writing, have developed authorial agency and are able to engage in meaningful discussions about their own work and the work of others. Writing evidence will be recorded in writing books.

Writing will be assessed using:

• Cold tasks (at the start of units) whereby teachers assess children’s writing in order to inform their planning, address misconceptions and move learning on.
• Hot tasks (after the unit has been completed) whereby teachers assess the impact of the teaching.
• Assessment against objectives for each year group will be routinely cross-checked by teachers both at moderation and as an assessment tool when analysing the outcome of the children’s hot tasks. This assessment document will be used to moderate and standardise our assessments.
• Writing moderation: year group, Phase, whole-school and cluster/academy writing moderation led by teachers in school.
• Year 2 and Year 6, TAF (teacher framework) and exemplification documents are used as a reference during the in-school moderation of these specific year groups.