When on placement for my teacher training, I learned much from excellent teachers delivering amazing practice in key stage 1 classrooms. But there was one approach I was left perplexed by: teaching cursive writing.
Time and time again, I saw 5- and 6-year-olds utterly disheartened because they had not received a thumbs up for getting that pre-cursive letter correct and were unable to move on to the next letter. It didn’t take long for them to lose confidence in their own writing abilities.
As an adult who doesn’t write in cursive script, I wondered what the point of this practice was, and if there was any research to support it. When reading about the topic, I discovered that cursive writing is not part of the National Curriculum. And yet, in every single school I had a placement, there was an emphasis on this approach to writing.
Where, then, does pre-cursive and cursive writing come from? And why do so many schools teach it?
For my dissertation, I set out to answer these questions and delved into research with an open mind.
At first, the research seemed to support the use of cursive writing. One report, Teaching of cursive writing in the first year of primary school: Effect on reading and writing skills, published in 2019 by Italian researcher Cristina Semeraro and others, found that children who were taught cursive had better reading and writing skills overall, compared to those who wrote in print.
Other positive perspectives in research date back to the 70s, a time when cursive would show “class” and may have been included in private lessons.
In 1979, educators Helen Kaufman and Phyllis Biren published Cursive Writing: An Aid to Reading and Spelling, which claimed that cursive writing is easier to learn for children due to the flowing motions of the script.
However, neither this, nor the 2019 study, considered the effect on children with special educational needs or disabilities, or those who are left-handed.
It’s established in literature that many left-handed children struggle with cursive. In 2009, Professor Viola Supon wrote Cursive Writing: Are Its Last Days Approaching?, in which she explains that left-handers struggle with cursive script due to the way their hand “hooks” around while they write and that this can lead to poor penmanship.
And it isn’t just left-handed pupils who may struggle. In an article for Tes, early years foundation lead Helen Pinnington argues that, when writing cursive, many children print the letter first and then add in the flicks after. And yet, the main argument for cursive is that the flow of the act of writing in cursive helps children to write neatly and quicker. If children are printing first and then adding the flicks, this defeats the object of cursive.
More longitudinal research is needed here: it would be interesting to see how long it takes a child to learn cursive versus print and whether cursive helps children with dyslexia or any SEND to write better than using print. In all of this, children’s opinions are needed.
I wanted to gather some snapshot research of my own to see what teachers and parents thought, and had responses from 25 teachers and 51 parents.
It’s a small sample, but the results were really interesting.
Around 80 per cent of teachers taught cursive writing, while 89 per cent of parents reported that their children were taught the cursive writing method.
Just over half (52 per cent) of teachers said their schools did not have a cursive writing policy, or they did not know if the school had a cursive writing policy. This is interesting to compare with the finding above: schools, then, may not have official policies on cursive writing, but there is still an expectation that it’s taught.
Around two-thirds of teachers (68 per cent) did not believe, or were unsure, if cursive writing had any long-term benefits for children.
There were also responses that supported the practice: 9 per cent of teachers claimed that cursive can help children when filling out forms in later life and can help to develop a signature, while 26 per cent of parents said that cursive had had a positive effect because their child’s handwriting has become much neater since using the cursive technique.
However, these opinions were in the minority, and more respondents believe that cursive is no longer needed, and actually hinders, more than helps, students.
And actually, it seems that the Department for Education agrees with this view. The new primary reading framework, published in 2021, states: “Learning to form letters and spell words requires considerable effort and attention. Schools, therefore, should consider the advantages to children of delaying the teaching of joined handwriting.”
It goes on to explain that “nearly all the headteachers in the schools Ofsted visited for its [2017] ‘Bold Beginnings’ survey did not teach a cursive or pre-cursive script in Reception”. Teachers told inspectors that they believed “it slowed down children’s writing at a point when they already found manual dexterity tricky, and the muscles in their shoulders, arms and hands were still developing”.
So, is it finally time to drop cursive in KS1, then?
In my own experience, cursive seems to rely on the assumption that all children adapt and progress in the same style - and we know this isn’t the case, because all children are different. Education is not a one-size-fits-all approach and, with this in mind, teachers need to take into consideration children’s agency when it comes to writing and allow them to voice their own opinions on how they choose to write, providing it is legible.
Aimee Robinson is starting her PGCE in September
