This is the first in a series of blogs examining how one school, St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School in Birmingham, has attempted to improve students’ writing. Future blogs will examine the main levers for change as well as the nuances behind the disciplinary approach to writing that has been employed.
“Our students just don’t write well in exams!” was the cry from a teacher in 2019 on hearing the results of some of her students. We began with this question, however the foremost responsibility of any school leader is to pinpoint the actual issue at hand. Is it a lack of academic vocabulary? Poor reading fluency? Clogged up working memories? Lack of cultural capital? Lack of writing fluency? Writing resilience? Poor independent study habits? The questions could of course keep going but for us it was important that almost all our questions went to literacy; it is here where our plan to improve writing starts but not with a focus on writing.
If the essence of our issue lies in literacy, surely we are ready to go full steam ahead with the EEF’s guidance report on Secondary Literacy and introduce the shiny new writing strategy. Our experience with thinking deeply about implementation though made us put the brakes on. Before we leap into solutions, it is imperative to meticulously define the issue. Only then can we start to precisely codify the active ingredients necessary to bring about the changes we desire. This is not a phase to be rushed; resist the allure of a quick-fix solution. Instead, take a long-term view and plan for how to improve over the next two to three years.
Clarity came for our thinking when we gave ourselves time to make the changes we needed. We decided on a three year plan with Year 1 focussing on oracy and eloquence, Year 2 on reading and Year 3 would begin our work on improving writing. We quickly determined though that the writing work was going to take more than a year. For a school with over half of the students designated as Pupil Premium, we knew the language gap was a critical lever and Marc Rowland’s phrase, when written in 2022, resonated deeply with both our mission and objectives.
