Over a series of blogs, we will detail the journey towards our goal of every child being a writer. In a slightly abstract approach, I am starting with a house which collapsed as a result of having poor foundations.
At this point, you are more than welcome to predict why our children were not the writers we want them to be! As the headteacher of Alexandra Park Research School, I will openly admit that our children do not write at the level I want for them. If 97% of our children can leave our school at the expected level in maths, why are only 85% of them leaving at the expected level in writing? And more importantly, what can we do to help these children become better writers?
There is an argument that during Covid our home learning prioritised reading, maths and PSHE. However, it is often our most vulnerable children who are not working at age related expectations in writing, and they were in school being taught in small groups during much of Covid. A further point to consider is the difference between maths and an English lesson I observed last week. In maths, the children were learning to divide by 100. This is quite a discrete skill which requires a strong understanding of place value but the learning is very similar and connects, builds on and reinforces the previous sequence of lessons on multiplying by 10, 100 and dividing by 10. If I then compare this to the English lesson, where the children were expected to write a character description of Fagin, from Oliver Twist, the breadth of knowledge and learning required is clearly much more demanding. All that said, this creates a challenge not an excuse and if children have the cognitive capability of achieving in maths, then we should have the same high expectation of them as writers.
While considering this challenge, we began to explore and revisit a range of EEF guidance reports, including: Teacher Feedback to Improve Pupil Learning, Improving Literacy in Key Stage 2; Metacognition and Self-regulated Learning; Special Educational Needs in Mainstream Schools, and Making Best Use of Teaching Assistants.
