Writing

Subject Intent:

• To increase pupils’ prospects by ensuring that all children can confidently communicate and transfer their knowledge, ideas and emotions through their writing. We are determined to ensure that our pupils can speak, read and write fluently so that they can succeed in future life.
• Building foundations for a love of life, a love of learning and a love of one another
• To ensure children’s phonic skills are secure as early as possible as these are essential to developing as a competent, assertive reader and subsequently a proficient writer.
• To provide early reading foundations that enable pupils to be enthusiastic readers with a passion and love for storytelling, literature and vocabulary which inspires them to write.
• To provide early writing opportunities to immerse pupils in purposeful transcription and formation activities.
• To ensure that all children learn to write.
• For children to become enthusiastic and motivated writers.
• To immerse children in a range of genres in order to write for purpose and audience.
• To encourage a love of literature.
• Through thorough tracking and moderating we ensure that no child is left behind; those few pupils who find learning to write a challenge are supported through scaffolding and interventions to cater for their needs.

Key Documents

Writing at USL

USL Curriculum Progression Writing (Updated with Essential Spelling Oct 24)

USL Writing Policy 2026

Upton St Leonards USL Handwriting Policy

ELS Mnemonics and Rhymes to support Letter Formation

USL Action Plan Writing 25-26

Scaffolding in Writing

SMSC in Writing at USL

British Values in Writing at USL

Long Term Planning Documents - Progression

Writing Progression Document

Writing Assessment Criteria

How we teach Writing

Our writing lessons follow the below framework in terms of implementation: 

Writing Lesson Framework

 Feedback and Marking Guidance for Writing

Handwriting Lesson Framework

At Upton St Leonards, we have adapted the Talk for Writing approach to create our own approach to the teaching of writing which is based on the principles of how we learn. There are three phases which promote movement from imitation to innovation to independent application. These phases enable children to imitate orally the language they need for a particular genre, before reading and analysing it, and then writing their own version.

Our Writing Curriculum is designed with our pupils' needs at the heart. Oracy screening in the EYFS demonstrates that children's vocabulary and oracy is not a key area of need for our pupils. However, historically, spelling, punctuation and grammar have been. A focus on SPAG is therefore a key feature of our adapted curriculum design. The coverage of spelling, grammar and punctuation for each year group has been explicitly mapped out to ensure that children’s knowledge, understanding and application is secure and built upon term by term, year on year. We have daily retrieval quizzes so that prior learning is revisited and embedded into the long-term memory. 

USL Approach to Writing

From a young age, we engage with our children by smiling and cooing with them as a baby, getting them to imitate sounds and words in their first year and enjoying nursery rhymes and actions with them in their toddler years. This is how children learn. This is how children respond.

Our writing approach encompasses all of the skills we use in early infanthood and allows children to develop their oral skills, which subsequently develop their writing skills; if you can say it, you can write it.

At Upton St Leonards C of E Primary School, we believe that by following our approach, every child is able to access stories, poems and information texts and use these platforms to create their own masterpieces.