Intent

It is our intent that children at Roehampton Church School receive a high-quality writing curriculum that develops confident writers, communicators and fluent readers who are able to effectively articulate their knowledge, ideas and emotions through their writing. 
We want children to write accurately and coherently, adapting their language and style for a range of subjects, contexts, purposes and audiences. We aim for children to use their knowledge of grammar, punctuation and spelling to express their thoughts with clarity, efficiency and meaning.
We want children to know that all good writers follow a writing process of planning, refining and editing their work, identifying their own areas for improvement. We believe that all pupils should be encouraged to take pride in the presentation of their writing and display a neat, cursive style developing as they go through the school.

Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS)
By the end of EYFS, children will be able to use their phonics knowledge to write words which match their spoken sounds, as well as being able to write some irregular common words. Children will be able to write their name, and begin to write short sentences in meaningful contexts. Words will be spelt correctly or be phonetically plausible.

Year 1
By the end of Year 1, children will be able to name the letters of the alphabet and spell words containing each of the 40+ phonemes taught, common exception words and days of the week. Children will be able to form lower-case letters in the correct direction and use capital letters.  They will leave spaces between written words. They will use prefixes and suffixes taught. Children will be able to write form memory simple sentences dictated by the teacher. They will be able to compose sentences, sequencing them into short narratives and will begin to punctuate sentences.

Key Stage 1 (KS1)
By the end of KS1, children will be able to spell by segmenting words, learn new ways of spelling phonemes, and learn to spell common exception words and words with contracted form. They will be able to distinguish between homophones. Children will form letters at the correct size and begin to use horizontal strokes needed to join letters. 
Children will compose narratives about personal experiences and real events, write poetry and write for a range of different purposes. They will plan ideas through talking and writing. They will evaluate their sentences with their teacher or other pupils, re-read their work to check it makes sense and proof-read to check for spelling, grammar and punctuation mistakes. They will include a range of punctuation, noun phrases and use the present and past tenses correctly. 

Key Stage 2 (KS2)
By the end of KS2, children will use further prefixes and suffixes and spell some words with silent letters. Use knowledge of morphology and etymology in spelling and understand that the spelling of some words needs to be learnt specifically.  They will use dictionaries to check the spelling and meanings of words and use thesauruses effectively. 
Children will continue to will plan, draft and evaluate and edit their work, identifying the audience and purpose for writing. They will be able to select appropriate grammar and vocabulary and use a wide range of devices to build cohesion. They will build their grammar knowledge by using passive verbs, expanded noun phrases, modal verbs, relative clauses and indicate grammatical features using commas, hyphens, parenthesis, semi-colons, colons and accurate punctuation. 

Implementation

At Roehampton Church School, writing is taught daily during whole class lessons. We follow a text-based learning approach during English lessons, where lessons are based on a range of rich, high quality and carefully chosen core texts. Pupils are given opportunities to write in a wide range of genres and become familiar with the features of each e.g. narrative stories, writing in role and discursive and persuasive writing. Pupils also explore poetry at different points across the year with a focus on creating and performing poetry. Within each unit of work, sequenced lessons ensure that prior learning is checked and built upon and that National Curriculum objectives are taught through a combination of opportunities and approaches. 
Within lessons, teachers and teaching assistants target support for a range of abilities to enable pupils to achieve an age-related level wherever possible. Teachers use a range of techniques in writing lessons such as modelled writing (where the teacher models and highlights the strategies used by successful writers), shared writing (a teacher-led, whole-class or group activity which draws pupils into the writing process) and guided writing (where pupils use their new skills to complete the activity in pairs or a group, focusing on particular targets and analysing their progress through teacher guidance). Children are provided with the tools they need to be successful in their writing such as word banks, dictionaries or writing frames. Teachers display key vocabulary and terminology on working walls, reflecting the current learning of the children. These specific words are taught to the children as part of the lesson and referred to continuously throughout the sequence of lessons within a unit.
At Roehampton Church School, teachers quickly identify pupils who may need further support and implement it quickly. This may involve a greater level of scaffolding and access to additional support materials, such as additional word banks and visuals or a greater level of modelling. In the vast majority of cases, pupils who are working below age expected levels still have opportunities to explore the text(s) during whole class lessons. However, they may be working towards different learning outcomes that are more closely matched to their ability and pupils with more complex SEND may have access to a scribe or laptop for some writing activities. Please see our SEND/Equality Statement of Intent/Implementation for more information on ways in which we seek to ensure that all pupils have opportunities to succeed across the curriculum (hyperlink).  
Pupils who are able to confidently achieve age-related levels, are given opportunities to extend their writing in a variety of ways, such as through showing greater control in their writing, demonstrating a deeper understanding of the impact their writing has on the reader and by using a higher level of vocabulary and grammatical features. 
We moderate writing using age related expectations within our school in adjacent year groups and through local authority events.
Children in EYFS, have a daily phonics lesson, using the Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised synthetic phonics programme. Please see our Phonics and Early Reading Intent, Implementation and Impact Statement for more information (hyperlink). 
Early writing is taught through early mark making, then when the children begin Little Wandle Letters and Sounds Revised phonics they are taught the letter formations. Writing is embedded in EYFS through a cross-curricular approach. Role-play areas are used to encourage reading and writing with a purpose. Pupils have access to a range of writing materials both in the indoor and outdoor classroom. We develop pupils’ language comprehension by regularly talking to them about the world around them and the stories we read. Additional support is provided for pupils who have low levels of language through speech and language sessions. 
Each year group has a yearly English curriculum overview (hyperlink English curriculum overviews for website) of the writing units to be covered, which includes a range of genres. These have been planned to ensure correct coverage of the key genres as well as build on skills from year to year. The outcome of each unit will be independent writing, which will be used to assess the pupil’s skills against the agreed success criteria. Every narrative unit is linked to a carefully chosen text that acts as a stimulus for teaching the identified text, word and sentence level features that children will be expected to include in their extended writing outcome for that unit. Non-fiction units are also taught through a high-quality text or may be related to another curriculum area. 
Pupils are given opportunities to evaluate, edit and improve and reflect on their own work so that they may develop their own sense of achievement. Teachers give clear feedback to pupils so they know how to improve and what they did well. Feedback, where possible, will be given within the lesson. All marking and feedback is given in line with our marking and feedback policy. Summative assessments will be entered into Target Tracker each term. Teachers will use their professional judgement, in conjunction with writing assessment criteria for each year group, to determine whether a child is working within age-related expectations or working above or below this. Teachers will base their judgements on the quality of the extended writing that pupils produce at the end of each unit.