As this year’s Sats results show, schools are facing huge challenges around supporting pupils’ writing development.
While key stage 1 results were down across the board, the steepest decline was in writing: the percentage of children reaching the expected standard fell from 69 per cent in 2019, to just 58 per cent in 2022. Worse still, a mere 41 per cent of disadvantaged pupils attained the pass mark in writing this year.
Key stage 2 results also dropped: just 69 per cent of pupils reached the expected standard, compared with 78 per cent in 2019.
This paints a grim picture of the damage wreaked by the pandemic and its after-effects. But why has writing, in particular, been so badly affected? There are a number of possible reasons.
A lack of oral communication
For our very youngest children, the impact of school closures meant they missed a sensitive period for their language development. Many children didn’t have the same access to in-person communication they might otherwise have had; given that oral communication underpins writing skill, this may have made a huge difference.
On top of that, children may also have missed out on the building blocks of word reading, formative steps in their handwriting, and more.
We know that early writing is a complex developmental skill; it’s not easy to teach virtually, and parents are simply not trained to replicate the expertise of teachers.
According to Stacey Rand, head of school at Evenwood C of E Primary School, near Bishop Auckland, this made writing particularly tricky to resource.
“With reading and maths, we could send materials home during the pandemic, but with writing it was much more difficult. Not only that, but we also couldn’t offer the usual modelling and feedback that is so crucial for developing skilled writing,” she says.
So what can schools do to tackle the problem?
Start with handwriting
Focusing on handwriting could be wise for all primary teachers, but especially for those in key stage 1.
Handwriting is a vital skill for early writing development, but the pandemic disruption interrupted the daily practice of developing pupils’ fine motor skills, which are needed to help them write legibly and fluently.
Ensuring that handwriting becomes automatic is crucial, so that pupils can tackle the many other complex moves of writing. Research shows that when children don’t have to work hard at handwriting, this frees up the necessary mental bandwidth to go on to write well. It is no surprise that fluent handwriting is linked to improved spelling and even more detailed planning of writing.
Organisations such as the National Handwriting Association offer useful resources, and teachers can also use assessment tools like the free handwriting legibility scale developed by researchers at Oxford Brookes University.
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Sort out sentences
Many teachers have talked about the fall in writing outcomes necessitating a return to “the basics”; this means starting with pencil grip before prioritising spelling and punctuation accuracy.
Another manageable but meaningful solution is to focus on supporting pupils to write better sentences.
Rand explains how pupils at Evenwood had lost their “writing stamina” because writing practice was compromised so heavily during the pandemic.
Research indicates that the best way to address this may be to start off small and create strong sentence-level foundations to build from, rather than launching into a series of “big writes”.
Sentence combining (when two simple sentences are combined into one complex sentence) can build good grammar knowledge and help to improve early writing.
For instance, take these two simple sentences:
The tired man climbed the mountain.
The mountain was covered in snow.
Combined into one sentence, they become:
The tired man climbed the snow-covered mountain.
Other activities can include expanding sentences and shrinking sentences (by asking pupils to purposefully add or remove clauses), and explicitly teaching clusters of vocabulary that signpost sentences, such as “first…furthermore…finally” or “because…but…so”.
By starting small, along with sustaining high-quality daily writing practice, we can move from super sentences to building pupils’ stamina with more extended writing practice.
Relearn writing independence
A key developmental step for young writers is the move to writing independently, and undertaking the whole writing process, from planning and drafting right through to editing and revising.
This was a skill that was often lacking during pandemic home learning, says Beth Dawson, head of school at St Michael’s CofE Primary School, in Northumberland.
“We had parents wanting to help their children - especially when they were struggling with writing. This meant that independent writing often wasn’t independent at all,” she says.
As a result, she found many pupils returned to classrooms lacking the self-regulation to edit and revise their own writing without external support.
To tackle this, children at her school are currently working on the writing basics mentioned above, along with step-by step scaffolding for independent writing.
Modelling the entire writing process will be crucial here, as will removing scaffolding in stages, allowing children to make the shift to truly independent writing.
Writing outcomes this year may tell a bleak story but the situation certainly isn’t hopeless. Simple classroom practices are bound to make a positive difference.
Alex Quigley is the national content and engagement manager at the Education Endowment Foundation. He is a former teacher and author of Closing the Writing Gap, published by Routledge
