Building on Success of Year 6 Writing

After visiting a feeder primary school before the summer holiday, we were overjoyed to see such brilliant written work from year 6 students who are due to join our secondary school in September. These ten and eleven year olds were indeed producing work that would be the envy of some of our GCSE students – creatively crafted, with extensive vocabulary, a full range of sentence structures and accurate punctuation.

Sometimes, as secondary teachers, we don’t see enough of what students’ potentially could produce when they join us fresh from the summer holidays and we often fall foul to the dip in progress from year 6 into year 7. We can learn a lot from primary schools when it comes to writing. Exposing students to a wide variety of genres in their reading of fiction and non- fiction is clearly a key starting point; although we may do this in key stage 3, sometimes we take for granted that students can write a magazine article or a piece for a tabloid newspaper without taking the time to dissect how this particular genre is written. The time our feeder primary school employs in creating shared success criteria for a piece of writing really enables students to get to grips with what is expected in their own writing. The next step of modelling is essential in developing a deeper understanding of how the success criteria can be met. We plan to use our visualisers to demonstrate how we could meet the success criteria for a particular genre, audience or purpose with our year 7s. Talking through the process of writing is essential for students to create their own authorial voices and to experiment with tone; hopefully the visualiser will help with students seeing writing as an organic process that doesn’t need to just satisfy the success criteria but can be their chance to voice their opinions on paper. The time then given to planning, drafting and re-drafting at primary school really enables students to produce their very best pieces of work that are carefully constructed and considered. The teachers’ live feedback during lessons allows students to make amendments, additions and alterations which in turn mean that students can produce a quality piece of writing in 45 minutes, just as we would expect our GCSE students to do. Sometimes we have shied away from providing extended writing opportunities for our year 7s but we do indeed need more time for this in order to keep the momentum and stamina up.

So how can we stretch and challenge these fabulous writers when they join us in year 7? Obviously the challenge of producing writing for a greater range of purposes is one way in which we can challenge our students. The GCSE English Language Paper 2 Examiners’ Report states that students who engaged with the “big ideas: politics, economics, gender, aesthetics, class, morality, psychology, even philosophy…were able to frame their own perspectives in this larger context and thereby enhance the quality of their argument”. So why not start building this cultural capital as soon as students join us – allowing students to respond to statements that get them to formulate their arguments in terms of these big ideas and writing for real audiences and purposes will challenge these already successful writers and allow them the opportunity to develop their own voices through their writing.