Those familiar with GCSE English Language will be well aware that 20% of a student’s final grade is made up of their ability to “use a range of vocabulary and sentence structures for clarity, purpose and effect, with accurate spelling and punctuation” (AQA). Analysing the breakdown of results in the early years of the most recent specification, it became clear that our students were underperforming in this one crucial assessment objective – arguably one of the only areas of English where a label of right or wrong can be applied.
With a year group average score of below 50%, it was clear something had to change; our over-reliance on whole text writing frames and a focus on what constituted rhetorical or descriptive devices was, on its own, an essentially flawed approach to teaching writing when students hadn’t mastered the basics of sentence construction and punctuation.
Thus began the still ongoing process of creating and adapting a writing curriculum which begins in Key Stage 3 with explicitly teaching the skills needed to successfully fulfil the criteria of the assessment objective outlined above.
In the early days, our thinking was influenced heavily by Daisy Christodoulou’s work ‘Why and How We Should Teach Grammar’ which explores the assumption that to understand where to a place a piece of punctuation, a student must understand what a sentence is, but to understand what a sentence is, they must first understand what a subject and a verb are.
