At Meadow Green, we believe that our children learning to write well for a range of purposes and audiences is key to their success as they move through primary school and beyond. At Meadow Green, we endeavour to develop children’s writing skills through high quality planning and teaching. We want our children to develop a range of knowledge and skills that they can apply to a wide range of different writing types, not only in English lessons, but across the whole curriculum. The objectives of the National Curriculum are closely followed to ensure that the skills learnt in spelling, punctuation and grammar are embedded and transferred into writing. We want the children to enjoy writing, develop their imaginations and understand the purpose of writing in different contexts and for different audiences.

At Meadow Green, we endeavour to start the writing learning journey as soon as the children enter school in the early years’ foundation stage. Year on year, these skills are strengthened, and added to, so that the children are continually being challenged within lessons. We endeavour to develop the children’s handwriting, spelling, grammar and vocabulary knowledge through engaging writing opportunities. We hope with our interesting and progressive writing curriculum, our pupils will be motivated to write and become confident and independent writers. High quality texts are used in English lessons to support written outcomes and are specifically chosen to allow for a wide range of writing opportunities to be utilised.

At Meadow Green, we use the ‘Purpose for Writing’ approach with the four ‘purposes’ being writing to entertain, writing to inform, writing to persuade and writing to discuss. From Year 1 onwards, these purposes provide the building blocks on which children are able to develop their knowledge and skills. The children understand the links between different writing types and are subsequently able to apply prior skills learnt into new contexts.

Spelling is an important skill both in and out of school. Spelling is taught explicitly using the No Nonsense Spelling scheme and is regularly revisited in lessons through high quality shared and modelled writing. Grammar objectives are taught both explicitly and during short lesson starters to provide all pupils plenty of opportunities to practise and apply their knowledge.

Termly whole school write weeks are used to motivate pupils and create a whole school focus on writing where each age group uses the same stimulus to develop into a written outcome. This includes all classes from nursery to Year 6. Work produced during these weeks is shared in whole school assemblies and allows children the opportunity to see the writing learning journey across the whole of the primary school age range.

Summative assessment is carried out each half term to assess spelling, punctuation and grammar objectives and interventions are put in to place for those pupils requiring additional support. Pupil progress is carefully tracked and monitored to ensure every child can achieve their potential at Meadow Green.

Our ultimate aim is, by the end of Year 6, to have developed pupils who are confident, imaginative and skilled writers who can apply their skills to writing tasks across the full range of subjects in the National Curriculum. This will then allow the children to move forward into the next stage of their learning journey at secondary school with the confidence that they can tackle any written task.