At Glebelands Primary Academy, we want all children to leave primary school being able to write confidently, enabling them to communicate clearly their thoughts, emotions, ideas, knowledge and understanding.

The teaching of writing is a key element of our English lessons alongside reading and speaking and listening. We know that all these elements contribute to writing development. We know that good readers often make good writers and that those who can speak clearly and fluently often have good sentence structure and spelling. Therefore, it is important that all these areas are valued and used alongside each other.

Although the teaching of writing is done through English lessons, children often write across all subject areas. Expectations for the standard of writing need to remain the same regardless of where the writing is taking place. Children need to be able to communicate their ideas clearly in all areas and not just an English lesson.

Writing is in fact a very complex process. Children need to know letter sounds and how to form and write the letters to make the sounds in the words they want to write. They need to understand how a grammatically correct sentence is formed and punctuated. They then need to learn the skills to extend and manipulate their ideas into more complex pieces of writing using a more varied range of grammatical features. Alongside this, they need to write for a range of purposes such as a letter or to tell a story, being aware of the audience they are writing for.

Writing needs to be taught progressively so that children are taught the skills and given the opportunity to embed before then being taught how to develop and extend further.