: What Are We Really Asking Pupils to Do? Rethinking Writing in Secondary Schools Using Ivanič’s writing discourses to rethink literacy, learning, and purpose across the secondary curriculum

Most fifteen-year-olds in a Cornish classroom would not put it like that. Many would say they write because the teacher asked them to, because the exam paper required it, or because the success criteria insisted. The gap between Didion’s writing-to-discover and a Year 10 student’s writing-to-comply is,I think, where the interesting questions about secondary literacy live.

A recent paper in Teaching and Teacher Education by Sturk, Rosvall and Jusslin (2026) explored how trainee teachers in Finland and Sweden were taught to notice these questions in their primary placements. The researchers used a structured observation model rooted in Roz Ivanič’s framework of writing ​‘discourses’ – seven distinct ways of conceptualising what writing actually is and what it is for. What they found is worth pausing on. Student teachers readily identified some discourses, particularly those concerning skills and genre, but struggled to recognise creativity and the sociopolitical dimensions of writing. The framework deserves a wider audience in secondary schools because it offers a precise vocabulary for a conversation we badly need to have.

Ivanič (2004, 2017) identified seven writing discourses: skills, genre, process, creativity, writing for thinking and learning, social practices, and sociopolitical. Each names a different assumption about what writing is and what it is for.

1. The skills discourse treats writing as correctness: spelling, grammar, punctuation, sentence accuracy.

2. The genre discourse treats writing as the production of recognisable text types: a letter, a persuasive piece, a structured exam response.

3. The process discourse foregrounds drafting, revising, and refining.

4. The creativity discourse prioritises voice, originality, and meaning-making.

5. The writing for thinking and learning discourse frames writing as a cognitive tool – a way of clarifying understanding.

6. The social practices discourse positions writing as real-world communication with audience and purpose.

7. The sociopolitical discourse asks whose voices are heard, whose are silenced, and how writing reproduces or challenges existing patterns of power.

In secondary schools, the first two discourses dominate so completely that the others can become invisible. We teach pupils to spell, to punctuate, to structure a paragraph, to meet the conventions of a PEE chain or a CER paragraph, and to satisfy the assessment objectives of an exam board. This work matters. It is genuinely difficult, and good teachers do it skilfully. A curriculum saturated by skills and genre, though, risks producing pupils who can perform writing without ever using it. They can answer a six-mark question without ever finding out what they think.

The most useful discourse for many secondary teachers, in my experience, is the one Ivanič calls writing for thinking and learning. It treats writing not as evidence that understanding has occurred but as the process through which understanding is constructed. In a history lesson, writing a causal explanation forces a pupil to sequence, to weigh, and to commit. In science, asking pupils to write why increasing temperature increases the rate of reaction before the textbook tells them produces a different kind of cognition from completing a
fill-in-the-blank exercise. This sits comfortably with the Education Endowment Foundation’s guidance on improving literacy in secondary schools (EEF, 2019) and on metacognition and self-regulated learning (EEF, 2018), both of which treat writing as part of how knowledge becomes secure rather than as proof that it already is.

The discourses that go missing are also instructive. Creativity is rare in secondary writing outside English. A Year 9 pupil designing an analogy for cellular respiration, or a Year 11 imagining a letter from a soldier in the trenches, is doing creative and disciplinary work at the same time. Social practices writing, where pupils write for an audience
beyond the marker, is rarer still, despite consistent evidence that authentic purpose sharpens attention to language (Graham, McKeown, Kiuhara and Harris, 2012). The sociopolitical discourse is the rarest of all. Questions of access, voice, and equity sit within almost every subject, from the canon studied in English to the case studies chosen in geography. Our pupils are not naïve about these
questions; we are simply not asking them to write about them.

A practical step, drawn directly from the Sturk et al. observation model, is for secondary departments to spend a CPD session looking at a fortnight’s worth of pupils’ writing through this framework. Pull out a sample of exercise books and ask four questions: Which discourses can we see? Which dominate? Which are absent? And what does this tell us about the kind of writers we are forming? The conversation that follows tends to be honest. It moves quickly past generic literacy mantras and into the specifics of what we are actually asking pupils to do, day by day, page by page. In a rural and coastal context like ours, where many pupils have a quieter relationship with academic writing, that specificity matters even more.

Writing in secondary schools is not only a vehicle for assessment. At its best, it is the means by which a young person discovers what they think. Didion wrote to find out. We owe our pupils the same chance.


References


EEF (2018) Metacognition and Self-Regulated Learning: Guidance Report. Education Endowment Foundation.

EEF (2019) Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools: Guidance Report. Education Endowment Foundation.

Graham, S., McKeown, D., Kiuhara, S., and Harris, K. (2012) A meta-analysis of writing instruction for students in the elementary grades. Journal of Educational Psychology, 104(4), 879 – 896.

Ivanič, R. (2004) Discourses of writing and learning to write. Language and Education, 18(3), 220 – 245.

Ivanič, R. (2017) Writing across and against the curriculum, in Bazerman, C. (ed.) The Lifespan Development of Writing. National Council of Teachers of English.

Sturk, E., Rosvall, C., and Jusslin, S. (2026) Learning to teach writing: Integration of theory and practice in primary teacher education. Teaching and Teacher Education (September 2026).