Sam Creighton is a Y5 teacher and the Literacy Lead at Elmhurst Primary School, a four-form primary school in Newham, London. In 2023, Elmhurst Primary was named the UKLA’s Literacy School of the Year, recognising the school’s commitment to all aspects of literacy and its creative and engaging literacy curriculum.

 For the last five years, Elmhurst has been developing and implementing an evidence-based Writing for Pleasure approach that has yielded hugely positive results. In a series of two blogs for Literacy Hive, Sam shares some of the practical steps that have been introduced to improve engagement and achievement in writing across the whole school community.

Developing Writers vs Doing Writing

Our decision to embark on a systematic review of our writing curriculum five years ago was driven by the realisation that, while we were hitting all the required markers for writing, there was much more that we could do to help our pupils develop as writers. This distinction between the activity of writing and a young person’s identity as a writer is a key theme of the latest writing research. In my first blog, The Freedom to Choose, I explored the changes that we have made in order to give our pupils more autonomy in their writing and to make our writing curriculum more child-centred. In this second blog, I will be exploring some of the other approaches that have been demonstrated to support and motivate young writers and sharing how we have implemented them in our classrooms at Elmhurst. As with everything, it all starts with time…

Creating Time to Write

There is a wealth of research into effective approaches for teaching writing, but a useful starting point is a recent report published by the Open University: Reading and Writing for Pleasure: A Framework for Practice⁽¹⁾. The report is the distillation of a three-year project (2020-2023) that included a review of existing research as well as analysis of data collected from six London-based literacy projects. One of the key findings of the Reading and Writing for Pleasure Framework is the need to ensure that children have the time to write: ‘When time is set aside – at home, in school, in a library, or as part of wider community events – and opportunities are offered to ‘just‘ read and write, children are enabled to exercise their agency and make choices as readers and writers’. It is obvious that the development of independence and competence requires regular practice. If we want children to learn to read, we make sure they practise daily. The same applies for learning a sport or an instrument, so why would it not also be true for learning to write?

As I mentioned in my previous blog, one of the more radical changes we implemented at Elmhurst was to split reading and writing into separate lessons. One of the key benefits of this is that it ensures children get an extended time to write each and every day. A writing lesson is split into three parts: a ‘mini lesson’ (teacher input, modelling etc.) for 15-20 minutes, independent writing time (while the teacher circulates to support) for 30 minutes, and then 10-15 minutes at the end of each lesson for ‘Author’s Chair’ (more on that later!). Across a unit’s duration of a half-term, this means children will have up to 20 hours of independent writing time, which comes with a myriad of benefits:

• Pupils can utilise that lesson’s focus immediately in their work.
• They get regular opportunities to practise all the previous skills they have learned.
• They are afforded the time they need to complete their project to the best of their ability.
• As teachers, we have time to circulate and give live feedback to many more students than would be possible in a short burst of writing.

A concern some of our teachers understandably had when we introduced this daily writing time was that children would not use the session productively, either running out of things to write or forcing themselves to write frantically to fill the time but ending up with writing that was rambling, unfocussed and confused. The answer to this has been the introduction of ‘personal writing projects’. These are separate exercise books in which children can pursue their own writing endeavours, with almost unfettered freedom. Each lesson, there will be an objective for the class project that children have to meet but, once they have done that, they can turn their attention to their personal writing project. This means that they are still writing productively but are not getting ahead of themselves in the class project, allowing the teacher to remain in control of collective progress. To ensure these personal writing projects retain purpose and direction, children are expected to publish at least one personal piece every half term.

Writing for a Purpose

As much as children adore their teacher and revel in their approval, the glow of our double tick at the end of their work only holds fascination for so long. As the Reading and Writing for Pleasure Framework makes clear, children are far more motivated to write when they are writing for real audiences and an authentic reason. That is why, at the very start of each writing unit, children at Elmhurst decide who the audience of their writing will be. Here are a few examples of what has been done recently:

• Short stories were sent to authors, editors, agents and publishers (approached via Twitter/X), who then provided individual feedback for each child.
• Poems were published in an anthology and sold to parents and the local community to raise money for charity.
• Explanation texts were put in the local library for people to go and read, along with a book for members of the public to leave comments.
• Biographies – as the children wrote a biography of someone from their family, we held an open afternoon where children’s relatives could come in to read their work.

All of these publishing outcomes were fairly easy to organise and had an immediate and hugely positive impact on our children’s engagement with their writing and their self-identity as a writer.

Building Writing Communities

It is a sad but inescapable fact that many adults (including teachers) have a negative view of writing and of themselves as writers because of bad experiences they had as young people. However, the Reading and Writing for Pleasure Framework offers a real statement of hope in the face of this: ‘Studies indicate, and the programmes evidence, that non-hierarchical, trusting relationships influence and can even undo young people’s assumptions or negative attitudes towards reading and writing. Such relationships are facilitated by conversational exchanges and spontaneous interactions around texts that are being written and read’. It is reassuring to reflect that, no matter how much we – or our pupils – might ‘hate’ writing, this negative writer identity is always fluid and can be shifted, repaired and improved by being part of a supportive writing community.

The research is clear: if we want to help children love writing and to see themselves as writers, we need to create a positive ‘culture of writing’ in our classrooms. We also know that such cultures are built on relationships, and that relationships grow out of discussion. At Elmhurst, we have therefore put talk at the centre of our writing classrooms, and there are two types of talk that we particularly prioritise in each lesson:

1. Collaborative peer talk during writing time: Collaborative talk is vital as it allows pupils to teach each other writing strategies, to reduce the cognitive load of writing by sharing problems with a partner, to adjust their text to their audience, and to reflect upon and better understand themselves as writers. This kind of talk has to be taught, which is why we spend time at the start of each year teaching and re-teaching the processes of our writing classrooms, including how to productively ask for and give writing feedback to your peers.
2. Group feedback: At the end of every single writing lesson, we have 10-15 minutes ringfenced as ‘Author’s Chair’. This is when pupils will read a section of their current composition to the class and receive feedback on a specific aspect of it. Not only has this proved to be an incredibly effective way of building a sense of community and shared respect, but it also allows individual children to reflect on their own and other people’s writing in a very sophisticated and meta-cognitive way. We have found that this has led to great improvements in pupils’ writing and awareness of authorial intent.

Our Role as Teachers in a Writing Classroom

Successful writing classrooms must be communities, and this has huge implications for us as teachers. One of the messages that really stood out for me from the Framework was the importance of positioning ourselves as ‘fellow writers’ – as part of our writing community, rather than separate from it: ‘Positioned as fellow readers and writers, these adults may voice their personal and emotional response to texts, write alongside children and express their own compositional challenges and satisfactions.’

This does not undermine our role as a mentor to our students, however. Good writing teachers are those who are both teachers and writers, and who bring those two identities together, allowing them to speak from a space of experience. This doesn’t mean that teachers need to be working towards being a published author to teach writing. However, subject and craft knowledge are important. If we want teachers to be able to plan a unit on how to write a good memoir and to be able to give constructive advice and feedback to students who are struggling, it is vital that they have a clear understanding of what is involved before they start. And the best way for them to do that is to write their own memoir in a similar style. That is why all the teachers at Elmhurst craft their own models before the start of a writing unit and often end up writing a second version alongside the children during the lessons.

Our understanding as teachers of the process of writing and our pupils’ view of us as ‘fellow writers’ has transformed the way that we interact with them around their work. Most of our feedback is now delivered through ‘pupil conferences’, where the teacher will talk to individual children about their writing during the lesson. As well as reducing the burden of written marking substantially, these pupil conferences ensure that students receive tailored feedback that they can immediately incorporate into their work. These regular – often daily – interactions enable us to challenge, extend or support each pupil as needed and have led to significantly improved outcomes for all our young writers.

Making Something Special

When we set out on our writing journey five years ago, our aim was to create an environment that would support all our pupils to develop as confident, independent and self-motivated young writers. Every school is unique, and each has its own specific challenges, but I hope that in these two blogs I have been able to show how we have taken some of the key findings from the latest writing research and made them work for our school community. There is much more that could be said about the findings of the Reading and Writing for Pleasure Framework or about writing teaching in general. If you are about to embark on your own writing journey, I highly recommend the research and resources of The Writing for Pleasure Centre, whose founders Ross Young and Felicity Ferguson have been instrumental in the changes we have made.

Real change takes time and effort, but for us that work has been worth it and we have seen huge benefits in terms of our children’s writing engagement, enjoyment and achievement. The best testament for any teaching, however, is from the children themselves, so I would like to leave you with a quote from one of our Y6 pupils: ‘It feels like you are really writing. We are really writing! Teachers value our ideas and we all get a chance to make something special!’

Notes

⁽¹⁾ Reading and Writing for Pleasure: A Framework for Practice, Teresa Cremin, Helen Hendry, Liz Chamberlain & Samantha Hulston (2024).