Writing

Intent

At Spring Lane, our writing curriculum empowers children to become confident, creative, and purposeful communicators. Through rich texts, real-life experiences, and meaningful contexts, we inspire aspirational thinkers to craft writing that reflects both imagination and intent. Children learn to communicate ideas with clarity and precision, developing their voice as authors who write to inform, persuade, entertain, and reflect. As expert learners, they are taught to value the writing process – planning, drafting, editing, and improving – showing resilience and independence in shaping their work. We encourage effective communication by immersing pupils in varied genres and vocabulary-rich environments, enabling them to make informed choices about structure, language, and tone. Our curriculum nurtures caring citizens by exploring diverse voices and lived experiences, encouraging empathy and understanding through the written word. It also develops healthy individuals and leaders, giving pupils the tools to express themselves, share their perspectives, and advocate for change through writing that has purpose, power, and authenticity.

Implementation

At Spring Lane, writing is implemented through a consistent, school-wide approach rooted in Talk for Writing, supported by Read Write Inc. Phonics, Read Write Inc. Spelling, and a carefully sequenced handwriting programme to secure strong transcription skills. From the very start in EYFS, children develop the foundations for writing through rich oral storytelling, explicit vocabulary instruction, and purposeful opportunities for mark-making and sentence construction. We place a strong emphasis on oracy as the foundation of composition—ensuring children can articulate, rehearse, and internalise sentence structures and story language before writing, which reduces cognitive overload and allows transcription to become increasingly automatic.  To build accuracy and fluency in transcription, we teach spelling explicitly through Read Write Inc. Spelling once children are secure in their phonics knowledge and application. This ensures children develop a strong understanding of spelling rules, patterns, and morphology, enabling them to write with greater confidence and independence. Handwriting is taught through regular, focused sessions so that children build stamina, fluency, and pride in the presentation of their work.

Each term begins with a consolidation unit, carefully designed to revisit prior learning, reactivate key toolkits, and secure sentence-level fluency. These units strengthen foundations, build confidence, and allow children to approach new learning with increased independence and clarity.

Throughout their writing journey, children are nurtured as purposeful authors with agency—writers who understand the impact of their words and make deliberate choices to suit audience, purpose, and form. Our Talk for Writing approach supports children to move from imitation to innovation to invention, with increasing independence at each stage. Through modelled texts and shared writing, they develop a deep understanding of genre features, sentence structures, and vocabulary, and then apply this knowledge creatively and flexibly.  Model texts are deliberately selected to ensure equity of access, particularly for disadvantaged pupils and those with SEND. This ensures all learners can engage meaningfully with high-quality writing, regardless of their starting points or experiences outside of school. Our curriculum is underpinned by rich, real-life experiences, aligned with our curriculum drivers. These experiences provide vital schema for children to draw upon—connecting knowledge, building understanding, and enabling writing with authenticity and depth.

Writing units are carefully spiralled across year groups to revisit and deepen key knowledge and skills, enabling children to know more, remember more, and apply more. Through collaborative learning, regular opportunities for reflection, and meaningful contexts, children become articulate, thoughtful, and empowered writers—ready to communicate with clarity, creativity, and purpose, both now and in the future.

What is the Talk for Writing approach?

The Talk for Writing approach, established by Pie Corbett and supported by Julia Strong,  enables children to imitate the key language they need for a particular topic orally before they try reading and analysing it. Through fun activities that help them rehearse the tune of the language they need, followed by shared writing to show them how to craft their writing, children are helped to write in the same style as the focus text, developing confidence and a passion for writing. The approach moves from dependence towards independence, with the teacher using shared and guided teaching to develop the ability in children to write creatively and powerfully. 

The approach is built upon three key stages that are revisited each time a new text is introduced: imitation, innovation and independent application.

Imitation

During this stage the children take part in a selection of activities to help them to internalise the pattern of language within the focus text. This is often followed by talking a focus text, supported visually by a text map and physical movements to help the children recall the story or non-fiction piece. In this way, the children hear the text, say it for themselves and enjoy it before seeing it written down. Once they have internalised the language of the text, they are in a position to read the text and start to think about the key ingredients that help to make it work. Children learn about the structure of the text by ‘boxing up’ each section and they create a toolkit which helps them to make sure they have the key ingredients within their independent writing later in the final stage.

Innovation

When children know the text well they move onto the innovation stage where they begin to merge their ideas and those from the focus text. They begin by altering their text maps and orally rehearse what they want to say, creating their own version of the focus text. The key activity in this stage is shared writing, helping the children to write their own by “doing one together” first. This process enables the children to write their own versions through developing their ability to generate good words and phrases in a safe way by continually revisiting key language and ideas from the focus text.

Independent Application

In this stage the children write their own invented story based on the ideas and key language of the focus text. They use the toolkit that was created in the innovation stage to act as a checklist, making sure they have included all of the good ingredients that they have learnt from the unit of work. They plan their writing using the text map or boxing up format and then use this as a framework to keep referring back to as they write. At this stage the children are brimming with ideas and key language that they want to get on the page.

Please see the link below for further information about our writing approach:

https://www.talk4writing.com/about/

Impact



The impact of our writing curriculum is seen in children who write with confidence, creativity, and purpose. They understand how to shape language to suit a range of audiences and intentions, and they see themselves as authors with agency—capable of using writing to inform, entertain, persuade, and reflect. Because learning is embedded in meaningful contexts, pupils are motivated to write and can draw on a wide bank of knowledge, vocabulary, and experiences to craft rich, well-structured pieces.

Children develop increasing independence and fluency in transcription, allowing them to focus on the craft of composition as they move through the school. Talk for Writing ensures that pupils internalise genre structures and develop strong oracy, which in turn enhances their ability to plan, draft, and refine their writing. Our consistent approach supports all learners, including those with SEND or limited literacy experiences outside of school, to access, succeed and thrive as writers.

Through collaboration and discussion, children learn to give and receive feedback, edit with purpose, and take pride in their writing. They leave Spring Lane as articulate, reflective communicators who can use the written word to express themselves, connect with others, and contribute meaningfully to the world around them.

Pupils’ writing knowledge and skills are assessed using the following:

● Retrieval practice and sentence-level skills revisited at the beginning of each unit and embedded throughout.

● Assessment for learning within lessons through high-quality questioning, live feedback, and conferencing.

● Pupil voice to gather insight into how children see themselves as writers and how well they retain and apply learning.

● Summative writing outcomes linked to the final purpose of each unit, moderated across year groups to ensure consistency and progress.

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