INTENT

 The children at Swalecliffe Community Primary School will be provided with a writing curriculum designed to:

• Create purposeful opportunities for writing so that our children become ‘real-world’ writers.
• Establish specific knowledge and skills progression across a unit of writing, focused on the age-related expectations for each year group. They will learn about the writer’s craft and the processes a writer goes through, including which genre best suits their purpose.
• Teach children how grammar works as a tool to enhance what it is they want to say.
• Build and develop new skills that form a child’s writing toolkit. These skills will be transferrable to other text/genre types in English and across the wider curriculum.
• Strengthens children vocabulary.
• Help children to understand that attention to transcription is essential if they are to write well.
• Provide children with a reassuringly consistent approach.
• Celebrate the writing of all children.
• Provide opportunities to make cross-curricular links.
• Enable opportunities to see good examples of writing and use these as models to inform their own constructions.
• Enables children to identify themselves as genuine writers.
• Equip and support all staff to become expert teachers of writing.

Our writing curriculum is underpinned by a wealth of research, in particular the work of Ross Young & Felicity Ferguson (Real-World Writers), Jane Considine (the FANTASTICs) and The Education Endowment Foundation. The concept of ‘Real-World’ Writers encourages the children to see themselves as apprentice writers who every day write together in what feels like a combination of a creative writers’ workshop and a serious, professional publishing house.  What we offer to children in school must feel real, relevant and meaningful to our children so that they are able to achieve their maximum potential. Real-World writing calls attention to the importance of children’s lives outside of the classroom as valued and legitimate sources of knowledge through a welcome project at the start of the year with a shared whole school stimulus and a personal project at the end of the year.  We believe that when children’s thoughts, interests and experiences are acknowledged and celebrated as valuable subjects for writing, they are highly motivated to write. We want our children to feel part of an authentic writing community – as genuine writers. In English lessons, they learn about the writer’s craft and the processes that writing goes through, which genres best serve their purposes.

Our writing curriculum focuses on the following six purposes of writing:

Most importantly though, we must ensure that children see that these purposes are interconnected.

The children will be taught to recognise how genres fit within these purposes: how skills and knowledge in writing is transferable across genres, as a result of these purposes.