Research School Network: Whole School Writing Improvements and The English Faculty Examples of improving writing in English

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. 

Christodoulou puts forward a strong argument for the teaching the fundamentals of grammar, and our writing curriculum begins in Year 7 with building the foundations of understanding grammar, with a focus on understanding word classes.

When a foundation has been established, attention then turns to sentence constructions themselves: crafting them, consciously punctuating them, and combining clauses. 

Both Lindsay Skinner’s ​‘Crafting Brilliant Sentences’ and Alex Quigley’s ​‘Closing the Writing Gap’ were influential resources in terms of types of sentence construction to teach and we begin with main clauses. 

Image A is an example of a recap activity following on from an introductory lesson to main clauses – the focus here is on what David Didau calls ​‘the hidden body of knowledge’ – the explicit knowledge of grammar that allows students to make conscious decisions about their writing. 

Deliberate practice activities (see Image B) also form a big part of our lessons, allowing students to master different sentence constructions. 

Hochmann and Wexler’s ​‘The Writing Revolution’, however, argues that grammatical knowledge is most likely to be retained by students when it is taught alongside knowledge rich content. 

Image C exemplifies two activities from an updated, more recent iteration, of a Year 7 lesson entitled ​‘Identifying and Writing Subordinate Clauses using Subordinating Conjunctions’, in which the deliberate practice moves from a decontextualised task, during which students focus solely on combining clauses, to a task requiring them to make a connection between their English Literature subject knowledge too. 

Subsequently, our Year 8 and 9 writing curriculum and sentence work activity is built around high-quality texts that further enable an immersion into knowledge rich content. (See images D and E for two examples from Year 8 non-fiction)

Despite this, sentence work alone is clearly not enough for students to become proficient writers and Tom Needham argues the need to strike a ​“suitable balance between practising components and appropriate extended writing.”

In order to build confidence, we have included slow writing tasks within our curriculum along with paragraph activities and longer, more regular independent writing tasks throughout Year 8 and 9. 

Ultimately, the purpose of the component work is that students will become proficient enough at the individual elements to embed them within lengthier pieces of writing over time – and they need to practise this too. 

The one hour of weekly curriculum time dedicated solely to writing from Year 7 to Year 9 is our opportunity to provide students with the tools they need to become accurate and fluent writers who express their ideas with clarity and effect. 

Although the process might be slow and the results not always instantaneous – as Quigley put it, we regularly have to keep ​“pushing the boulder back up the hill” - it is most definitely worth it.

This blog was written by: Hannah Brady, English teacher and Literacy PD lead at St Thomas Aquinas Catholic School, Birmingham. 

To find out more: 

Explicit English teaching by T. Needham (link to purchase options)

‘Closing the Writing Gap’ by A. Quigley (link to purchase options)

‘The Writing Revolution’ by Hoxler and Wexman (link to purchase options)

‘Crafting Brilliant Sentences’ by L. Skinner (link to purchase options) 

EEF Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools

This blog is the third in the Improving Literacy in Secondary Schools series. See blogs 1 and 2 on the Staffordshire Research School’s homepage.