This article was originally published on 8 November 2023

“There’s what we call the reading war about how to teach reading, and there’s probably a similar kind of war about how to teach writing,” says Julie Dockrell.

Dockrell is chair in psychology and special needs at UCL Institute of Education (IOE). She has spent much of her career researching writing development, so is all too familiar with the disagreements that exist about the best way to teach this skill.

But while the so-called “reading wars” ushered in a global shift in how reading is taught - with schools increasingly adopting phonics-based approaches backed by the science of reading - writing has yet to experience a similar revolution. 

In fact, the writing wars have barely been acknowledged by the education mainstream.

“Not that many people talk about it,” Dockrell says. “But it’s clearly out there.”

Left behind

That could all be about to change. With broad agreement about the benefits of phonics, attention is now shifting: in July, the government in England announced a review of how writing is being taught in schools.

Some say that such a review is needed, including Andrew Percival, a deputy head at Stanley Road Primary School, in Greater Manchester.

“I think it’s absolutely the right time for some sort of guidance that tries to summarise what good practice in writing looks like,” he says.

“We’ve had the reading wars, and phonics has absolutely dominated the debate. But I think writing has been left behind somewhere.”

Why has writing taken second place for so long? And could a closer look at the research result in a sea change to classroom practice, just as it did with reading?

Unreliable assessment

According to a report from the National Literacy Trust, published in June, England is now facing what the charity calls a “crisis” in writing, with just one in three (34.6 per cent) young people between the ages of 8 and 18 saying that they enjoy writing in their free time. That’s a 26 per cent drop on the 2010 figure.

Meanwhile, in this year’s key stage 2 Sats, the proportion of pupils meeting the expected standard in writing was 71 per cent - well below the 2019 figure of 78 per cent.

It’s clear that more needs to be done to support writing in schools, so why has the focus, instead, been solely on improving reading?

There are several reasons for this. First, this focus has been driven by a global assessment agenda that prioritises the assessment of reading, through tests such as the Programme for International Student Assessment (Pisa) and the Progress in International Reading Literacy Study (Pirls). 

“Those particular assessments are very widely and internationally used to leverage or influence what governments and policymakers do,” says Teresa Cremin, professor of education (literacy) at the Open University.

And even in one individual country, the assessment of writing can be notoriously unreliable. 

“What’s interesting is, if you look at standardised assessments for writing in English, there aren’t any below the age of 8,” says Dockrell.

“If you’ve got a seven-year-old who only writes 12 or 15 words, how do you judge that for the quality of the text? You can judge it for the grammar or spelling, and that’s easy, but, you know, the quality of the text is just really problematic.”

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These challenges around assessment have contributed to writing being lower than reading on the political and research agendas - and it has received less financial investment as a result. 

In England, for example, the government has poured money into its English hubs, which were designed to focus primarily on three key areas: phonics, language development and reading for pleasure.

“It is the case, unquestionably, that the money has gone to reading, because the money is in the hubs and we have 34 of them across the country, and they are well funded to support a number of initiatives, none of which really focuses on writing,” says Cremin.

Investment in reading over writing isn’t only happening in the UK. According to Steve Graham, a professor at Arizona State University in the US, “this is a problem worldwide”.

In the US, for example, “there has been a concerted effort by both non-profits and other people to make reading a cornerstone of education”, says Graham. And while reading is, of course, important, the powerful lobby behind it makes it difficult for writing researchers to push for equal attention.

“I can’t tell you how many times I’ve heard, you know, ‘We’re worried about whether it will take away attention from reading by saying that writing’s important,’” Graham says.

‘Writing is as demanding as playing a game of chess’

Graham’s partner, Karen Harris, also a professor at Arizona State University, agrees, adding that this pattern plays out in the classroom as well as at a policy level.

“One of the things that teachers we’ve worked with, not just in the States but in other countries, say is that reading is so emphasised and maths is so emphasised - and the tests in those subjects are so critical to the schools - that when something has to go, it’s writing,” she says.

It’s hard to change that, Graham explains, because while the success of phonics instruction has helped to communicate “what works” for reading, “the messaging is more complex” for writing.

“You just can’t say to people, ‘If kids become good spellers then they’re going to be great writers.’ That’s not going to be the case,” he says.

In fact, according to Debra Myhill, professor emerita of language and literacy education at the University of Exeter, writing is one of the most complex skills that children are asked to master.

“You could reduce reading to just two main strands. Basically, you’ve got to be able to decode, so just being able to look at letters on a page, know the sounds and create words out of them. And then there’s the comprehension of those words,” she explains.

But, “when it comes to writing, it’s a much more complex construct - a very different mental skill or social skill.” 

Children learning to write have to learn the act of physically shaping letters, which draws on fine motor skills.

They also have to develop skill in spelling, punctuation, grammar, generating ideas and understanding the best way to communicate those ideas, as well as drawing on vocabulary knowledge.

Managing all this, Myhill says, places incredible cognitive demands on young learners. And, unlike with reading, those demands don’t reduce as writers gain more experience.

“It’s difficult for young writers, but, actually, the research shows that even when you become an expert writer, the load is also immense,” says Myhill.

“In cognitive psychology, we talk about writing as being as demanding as playing a game of chess.”

The sheer complexity of writing makes it a more challenging topic to research than reading, with researchers tending to focus on a particular aspect of writing, such as handwriting or spelling, rather than writing as a “global construct”.

“There are lots of meta-analyses of interventions on writing instruction that will list different things that do work or don’t work. But to an extent, they all have weaknesses,” says Myhill.

This means it’s difficult to make sense of “what works” for teaching writing - and even more difficult to distil what we know from the research into a clear message that can be communicated to schools. 

And that, Graham says, has been to the detriment of writing at a policy level.

“If you don’t step out there and say, ‘This works,’ then people think, ‘Why should I bother doing this?’” he explains.

“You have people who are advocates for a kind of ‘simple view’ of writing. And there’s no ifs, ands or buts with them. From a policy point of view, that’s a smarter tactic than saying, ‘Oh, this is complex, and we don’t really know what we’re doing.’”

Caught vs taught

The search for a clear message is where the writing wars come in. There are, Graham says, two basic viewpoints about how people develop writing: one is that writing is “caught” and the other is that writing is “taught”.

From the “caught” viewpoint, the theory is that “all you basically need to do is have kids write for real purposes in meaningful situations, and they’ll be fine”, says Graham; whereas, from the “taught” viewpoint, it’s understood that children need to be explicitly taught certain skills.

The “caught” viewpoint is heavily associated with what is known as the “process approach”. This was developed by Donald Graves and became popular in the UK, the US, Australia and New Zealand in the 1980s. 

The process approach, as Dominic Wyse explains in a 2019 paper, places “learner choice and the development of the writer’s voice” at the heart of teaching.

To enact this, Graves encourages teachers to create a community of writers and set up a “publishing house” in their classroom.

“By which [Graves] meant - and I used to do this with kids, as a teacher - you actually make the books physically,” explains Wyse, who is a professor of early childhood and primary education at the IOE.

“In those days, you’d sew them together, you’d do the artwork and you’d put them in the reading area of the classroom, and the kids would read them and critique them and they became a resource.”

Finding the fun

In the process approach, children are given free choice over what they want to write and when they start and finish that piece of writing. One pupil might choose to spend “a whole term writing a long story”, while another might start to draft something and “after 10 minutes, start another piece because the first draft didn’t feel right to them”, says Wyse.

It is, Harris says, “for want of a great term, a constructivist or discovery-type approach” in which “you don’t teach anything explicitly or directly to the students”.

There are some clear benefits to the process approach. One is that it allows children to have an extended period of time to craft a piece of writing - something that is rare in most primary classrooms, says Wyse.

The approach is also popular, says Harris, because it prioritises rich discussion and children having fun with their writing.

“Except that a lot of kids are sitting in process classrooms not having any fun at all,” she caveats.

Research shows, she continues, that while the process approach does have a positive effect on writing, it is a “small effect”, and this method is therefore “not sufficient by itself” to help the majority of pupils to write well.

‘Too rigid’

So, process is at one end of the spectrum. At the other, we have explicit teaching of key skills, such as spelling. There is, says Graham, good evidence to support this approach.

“Teaching spelling, handwriting and typing has positive effects, not only on those skills but also on the overall quality of writing, because they interfere with other writing processes,” he says.

“There is also considerable evidence that if you teach kids how to engage in, you know, strategies for planning or revising, for evaluating, for monitoring their writing strategies around process, particularly if they’re genre-oriented - so, you know, a strategy for planning a persuasive text is different from one for planning a narrative text - that makes a difference.

“Teaching students, pretty much throughout school, how to construct sentences. Teaching kids transcription skills, how to take that from ideas, to sentences, to getting it on paper.”

Myhill agrees that one of the key messages from the research is that explicit teaching of the different components of writing is helpful.

This, she says, is something that teachers in England are already “very good at” because it has been prioritised by the national curriculum.

‘Neither the ‘caught’ nor ‘taught’ approach is adequate - it’s a combination of the two’

However, she worries that the focus on explicitly teaching skills has made the way that schools approach writing “a little bit too rigid and formulaic”.

“Pupils think that if you’re writing an argument, you must have a topic sentence, you must have ‘moreover’ and ‘however’ and all these things that you must put in, when what you really need is for writers to understand why they’re putting them in,” Myhill says.

Is there a risk of trying to force writing into a reading-shaped hole by latching on to one strand of instruction that has a strong evidence base? Wyse believes so. 

“The problem with seeing things in one way is that, as with phonics, this has been boiled down to a simple political message: synthetic phonics equals good; anything else equals bad.

“And I understand that politicians want to get messages across in a very crowded space. But you cannot do that with writing. It doesn’t boil down.”

Instead, he says, when it comes to writing, “balance is all”.

Graham, likewise, calls for balance: “I talked about the ‘caught’ and ‘taught’ approach, but I wouldn’t say either one of those is adequate. It’s a combination of the two.”

Breaking the rules

With that balance in mind, there are several strands that the research shows might be helpful to think about when it comes to considering “what works” for writing. 

One strand, Myhill suggests, is helping children to use metacognitive strategies to develop their writing. 

“There’s quite a lot of research that suggests that it’s very helpful for children to have metacognitive understanding of what they’re doing,” she says. 

If, for example, a child knows that they struggle with spelling, they might choose not to worry about that until the writing is complete, and then go back to pay particular attention to checking their spelling. 

Metacognitive understanding is also crucial for helping children to recognise when and how they can “break the rules” in their writing.

“When I say ‘rules’, I’m talking about conventions rather than literal, deep rules,” Myhill says. 

What makes a writer?

It’s important to share with pupils that sometimes a writer will move things around in a sentence, not because it’s grammatically incorrect but because it just doesn’t feel right or isn’t communicating the information in the best way, she explains.

“We need to get young children to be much more knowledgeable about the decisions they’re making as writers. The risk of saying that explicit teaching is known to be good is that it’s also known to lead to writers who can’t make decisions, which disables them later on,” Myhill says.

“So, explicit teaching has to raise explicit thinking about, well, why do we use ‘moreover’? How do you help children understand what a typical argument is like? But then, crucially, how do you help them to understand how they could do it differently?”

Positioning children as “authors” might be one way to help them to develop a sense of agency over their writing, suggests Cremin.

“I think one of the challenges we have is the way we position writers; we don’t position ‘writers’, we position ‘the teaching of writing’. And writers are not developed,” she says. 

“Gradually, I think we’ve moved to recognise that reading, as an act and an experience, is also related to being a reader, is choosing to undertake that experience. We need to make the same move in writing.”

‘Give the kids a voice, and find a way of helping that voice surface’

Helping pupils to see themselves as authors doesn’t mean doing lots of creative writing, Cremin stresses; it means helping children to see that you don’t have to have published “two short story collections” to be able to call yourself a writer.

“We’re all authors; we’re authoring, composing our work,” she says. “If writing is an act of identity performance and a matter of communication, what is it you want to say? Give the kids a voice, and find a way of helping that voice surface.”

Making sure that children have plenty of opportunities to write for specific and authentic purposes - where they can develop a sense of an audience and the best ways to communicate with that audience - is an important part of this, says Dockrell.

Traditionally, she explains, a lot of the extended writing that happens in primary schools involves either asking children to write a story or to write an experiential piece about, for example, what they did at the weekend.

“Now, the proportion of pupils that go on ever to write a story [in later life] is minimal. But there are other types of writing; for example, expository texts that children will need to use in science or history or geography, which really aren’t tackled,” Dockrell says.

A matter of time

Percival’s school offers one model of how this type of writing can be better supported. It has started to bring knowledge from the foundation subjects into its primary writing curriculum. 

For example, Year 5 pupils study an early civilisation in history. Once they have studied the topic and know it really well, they are then asked to write a piece about the impact that civilisation has had on the modern world.

“So, that would be writing a bit more like a historian might write - that more academic writing, rather than trying to turn it into a story or writing a newspaper report or something else anachronistic,” says Percival.

“A classic one would be to write a news report about the Vikings invading. That’s not really helping.”

Allowing pupils sufficient time to practise their writing is also critical, says Graham. A skill as complex as writing takes a lot of time to master and a lot of time to teach. 

Unfortunately, time is not something that most primary teachers have enough of. This is true, Graham says, all over the world.

“When I was doing workshops for teachers, I used to always start off by saying, ‘You need to double the amount of time kids are writing,’” he says.

“But immediately there were administrators in the audience who would push back and say, ‘Our teachers don’t have time to do this.’ And that’s a reasonable thing to say, right? We don’t have time to do what you’re suggesting.”

A complex transformation

With the primary curriculum already packed, is there anything that can be done to give teachers the time they need to focus on writing?

One way to encourage policymakers to make sure that writing is always a priority might be to pay more attention to the links between reading and writing.

Graham’s research shows that when you increase the amount of writing that pupils do, up to the age of about 11 or 12, the quality of their writing improves. Alongside this, there’s a corresponding improvement in reading comprehension.

Getting better at writing, then, makes children better readers - so even if reading were all that mattered, writing should still be a priority. 

When it comes to teaching approaches, though, there is a big difference between reading and writing. If policymakers are hoping the evidence might provide them with a phonics equivalent to roll out across schools, they are going to be disappointed. Transforming the teaching of writing will be a lot more complicated than that.

That’s because writing is just “so complex”, says Dockrell: “There’s nothing else you learn in school that is comparable.”