Best Practice

Fostering a love of writing for students in key stage 3

Literacy Reading and vocabulary English
How can schools support their students to develop a love of and a flair for writing as part of the key stage 3 English curriculum? Tamsin Church offers her advice
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Hemingway famously said: “There is nothing to writing. All you do is sit down at a typewriter and bleed.”

Of course, English teachers struggling to get students to write more than just a sentence or two may beg to differ.

All too often the blank page or the blank screen can provide a barrier that seems unsurmountable to the average teenager, who – let’s face it – is skilled in fast and pithy one-liners that pay little attention to the rules of punctuation.

The plaintive “miss/sir, I don’t know how to start” is all too common and real problem for many of our students.

 

Identifying the challenges

So just what is the problem with writing and how might we start to address the gap we see emerging between reading and writing attainment across key stages?

First, we need to acknowledge that the writing process is hard. It expects students to bring together a range of complex knowledge and activities – motor skills, planning, vocabulary, knowledge of sentence structures, awareness of audience – before anything is created.

No wonder then that the National Literacy Trust’s survey this year into writing found that fewer than a one-third of children and young people aged 8 to 18 say that they enjoy writing and students rarely take the opportunity to write in their free time (Clark et al, 2024).

In fact, the findings show both the enjoyment and the frequency of writing outside lessons is at an “unprecedented low”.

This research highlights the importance of fostering a more enjoyable and supportive environment for writing in and out of school.

Furthermore, GCSE English language examiners’ reports suggest that students are finding ways to cope with the complexities and anxieties associated with writing tasks by having some “prepared answers” and pre-prepared vocabulary lists (as cited in AQA’s GCSE English Language Paper 1 and 2 reports on the exam in 2024).

These challenges may be compounded by the fact that in key stage 3 (unlike in key stage 2) the national curriculum lists the writing skills that should be taught but offers no guidance on how to teach these skills.

This freedom, while liberating, can be daunting for English teachers – it feels like there are lots of opportunities to write but the explicit teaching of writing skills, which requires time and practice, is often squeezed.

                                                                                                       

Using small steps to success

In key stage 3 we need to remember we are building on the narrative skills developed in primary school, especially in key stage 2.

It is useful to reference this previous learning, such as an understanding of genre and a clear sense of audience and purpose, as this helps to build confidence as students feel like they have already accomplished some of the skills they need to become stronger writers.

To help them take the next steps, we need to break down the process and treat writing development in the same way as any other skill. Students need to know what is expected, see great examples and then have guided instruction to break the skill down into manageable chunks.

Instinctively, teachers can see when writing improves; but if key, high-currency strategies are rarely included in the teacher’s “toolkit” for writing, we are missing opportunities to address the writing gap.

Reviewing and reshaping the key stage 3 curriculum so that it offers more structure and guidance for students is central to closing the writing gap. Turning to evidence-based research about the most effective types of writing instruction can help here.

One good example is Young & Ferguson (2021). In this study, the authors looked at the impact of different strategies on writing development (see figure 1). Anything above 0.4 was deemed to be significantly and positively effective. Anything at 0.32 or below was deemed to be significantly ineffective or indeed damaging.

 

Figure 1: The impact of different strategies on writing development (source Young & Ferguson, 2021)

 

While these findings might be contentious, setting clear writing goals and teaching each of the components of the writing process – from generating ideas to modelling and co-construction – is key to addressing improvements in writing.

 

The importance of time to edit and review

All too often in secondary curriculum plans we move on at pace and although the national curriculum specifies covering editing and improvement this is often a neglected element of writing provision.

The diagram below outlines the stages of reviewing and editing. With this in mind, we might want to reflect on how we could give students regular opportunities to practise these skills to move beyond focusing on content, alongside some useful phrases or sentence starters.

If our goal is to foster students’ self-regulation, then we need to take time to experiment with each element of the writing process. It may be that we do fewer pieces of writing, but the quality improves significantly.

Figure 2: The stages of reviewing and editing our writing (source Graham et al, 2012).

 

Once students understand that writing is a recursive practice, we can then focus on impact and detail which is developed through creative writing sessions.

 

Adding a creative spark

Perhaps the most important element to improving writing outcomes – and also enjoyment of writing – is engagement. To achieve this we need to ignite students’ inner creativity by giving them a range of interesting and inspiring opportunities to put pen to paper.

Students need to have the chance to discuss and play with language, to practise creating characters by lingering on the details, to explore how settings can create specific moods, to experiment with plot structures and develop their understanding of what a great piece of writing might be.

The freedom to write should exist without it always being a high-stakes assessment, otherwise we will continue to have GCSE students desperate to have a pre-prepared piece to take into the exam. As curriculum leaders we need to carve-out time in the key stage 3 curriculum to ensure that teaching creative writing is an essential and not a luxury.

  • Tamsin Church is the lead secondary English adviser with HFL Education. Formerly Herts for Learning, HFL Education is a not-for-profit organisation providing services, training and resources for schools, including access to subject experts. Follow at @HFL_Education. This year SecEd is working with HFL Education to publish a series of subject-specific best practice articles. Find all the articles in this series via www.sec-ed.co.uk/authors/hfl-education  

 

Further information & resources

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