I hate planning!” cried the teacher. “We have to fill in endless boxes with literacy activities for every group, every day of the week! It takes hours and it’s no use to me or the children - just a pointless ritual to satisfy the Powers That Be.”

“So who are the Powers That Be?” I asked. “Who wants you to do this pointless stuff?” The language co-ordinator? The head? LEA advisers? As I worked along, trying to identify the culprit, each nodded towards the next person up - the English educational system can sometimes seem like a long chain of Chinese whispers. But then, at the end of the line, the finger pointed firmly in the direction of the usual suspect - OFSTED. Which is how, one day in the summer holidays, I found myself relaying the quote above to Janet Brennan, HMI with responsibility for literacy in the Primary Education Division.

Janet Brennan sighed wearily. Of course planning is important, but ritualised box-filling is a waste of precious time. She snorted in disgust at another teacher’s description of “spending my weekends moving words from one piece of paper to another” and looked positively distressed about the teacher who was “expending so much energy on planning that there’s none left for teaching”.

When I reached the “OFSTED seems to care more about planning than teaching” quote she erupted: “No! That’s 100 per cent not true!” So what is OFSTED’s position? What exactly does it expect in terms of planning for literacy? The more we talked around the question, the clearer it became that Janet Brennan saw planning as a teaching tool, not an exercise in bureaucracy. And she believes that if schools have got their act together in the past couple of years, the time-consuming part of the process should be over by now.

Planning was indeed at the top of OFSTED’s agenda in the early years of the National Literacy Strategy, when teachers had to familiarise themselves with strategy Framework objectives and devise ways of making them work in their own school. In these circumstances, a fairly high level of detail was necessary and important but, where the work was done properly, that investment of time and effort should now be starting to pay off.

The plans created over the past couple of years should provide clear descriptions of the literacy teaching to be undertaken in each term or half-term: blocks of work (about five per term) based on the requirements of the Framework. In Year 5 term 1, for instance, there will be a block on “books by a significant children’s author” and another on “recount writing”. They should include details of resources available, speaking and listening activities, cross-curricular links and other aspects specific to the school and year group, and they should already be broken into week-long or fortnight-long teaching packages, linking up text and sentence level objectives.

If this detailed planning from earlier years is clear, all the groundwork has been done. Those same plans should work in outline for this year, too, and for some years to come. Teachers will want to add to each block, as their own knowledge and expertise develops or new resources are acquired - and if they experiment with a variation that turns out to be terrific, they will want to note that down, too. But they do not need to plan the whole thing from scratch again.

These template plans should be centrally stored, so that any teacher - even one new to the year group - can find the block of work and use it as the starting point for weekly planning. So, sorting out your teaching objectives for the coming week and identifying the required resources should now be the work of moments. If it is on computer disk, you can cut and paste; otherwise a highlighter pen on a photocopied sheet should do the trick (and if you have acquired new materials since the plans were written, this is a good time to add them in, with relevant page references). The rest of weekly planning should be about teaching: the nitty-gritty of translating these objectives into classroom practice in this year’s circumstances with this year’s class. This means being absolutely clear about what you are doing in shared teaching each day, the independent activities it will lead into, what you will cover with the guided groups, how you will deploy any teaching support and so on.

Your weeklydaily plan should be a highly practical working document, but it should not be complicated. “What’s important is the clarity of the teaching intentions for each day,” she says, “that is, what will the children know by the end of the lesson that they didn’t know at the start?” These clear “teaching intentions” should arise from the specific objectives you are addressing, and should shine through your planning and everything that happens in the lesson.

They are what OFSTED inspectors are looking for. And once you have got them sorted out and are pursuing them, everything else falls into place.

* Pace - you will not be distracted by irrelevant detail.

* Differentiation - you can gauge the level of support necessary for each group to benefit, or even find links to Individual Education Plans.

* Plenary - perhaps you will need to revisit the main teaching points or review what the children have learned so far; or maybe you can link what they have learned to activities elsewhere in the curriculum, or follow it through with homework. And if you are clear about what you want to achieve, writing it down should not take too long.

It certainly should not involve juggling lots of independent activities - the literacy hour has shown that the most effective independent work is closely related to the content of that day’s shared session, so all children can usually do the same activity, scaffolded to particular groups.

Nor should it involve composing a week’s worth of detailed intentions on Sunday afternoon. You cannot possibly know at the beginning of the week exactly what you will need to emphasise on Friday - write too much down in advance, and you plan yourself into a corner.

Word level must be planned separately because phonics and spelling need very systematic coverage, which does not arise naturally out of text and sentence work. However, there are now NLS materials which more or less sort it out for you. Anyone using Progression in Phonics in key stage 1 just needs to identify the week’s phonemes and select activities for Demonstration, Show Me and Get Up and Go activities. after the first year, you should already have made or collected the relevant resources (and if you have not, these are now available ready-made from educational suppliers). In key stage 2, The Spelling Bank provides the wherewithal for systematic coverage of spelling objectives and commercial packages based on it are in the pipeline.

The other candidate for a separate sheet is guided work, where it makes sense to keep an ongoing planning-cum-record page for each group. On this you can make a weekly note of when you plan to see the children as well as the resources and objectives for each session. Using the same sheet for assessment and record-keeping saves time and ensures you have got the information handy when planning for the next week.

“Planning should always be directly related to teaching,” Janet Brennan concludes. “It’s about knowing your objectives, and breaking them down into clear teaching intentions throughout the week. What do I want the children to do today and how? How does that fit in with this week, fortnight, half-term? How will it make a difference to their learning?” I phoned one of my teacher friends to tell her about the conversation. “But it sounds so sensible,” she said incredulously. “We’ve got our blocks of work organised now and this year I’ll be basing my work on them just as she said - I’ve just got to add in the ideas from Grammar for Writing, which is new. And I already plan exactly the way she describes, on sheets of file paper in my teaching folder - those are my personal teaching notes, and I couldn’t work without them.

“The horrible bit has always been transferring everything on to the school’s special planning sheets, making it fit into those wretched boxes. It takes forever and has always seemed completely pointless from a teaching point of view - although I can see now that we were building up resources. Trouble is, we thought we had to carry on doing it indefinitely. We thought that was what OFSTED wanted.”

“Well,” I said, “the whisper is: once the grand plan exists, you don’t need to reinvent it every year. Pass it on.”

Sue Palmer is an independent writer and literacy in-service training provider. E-mail: sue@suepalmer.co.ukShe is currently working on Big Book Spelling for Heinemann (publication 2002)