Building on the foundations: Scaffolding writing from EYFS through Key Stage 1 and beyond

LOTTIE BOND, TRUST ENGLISH LEAD, LEARNING ACADEMIES TRUST, UK

Why focus on sentence-level work?

In many settings, the pressure on leaders and teachers to achieve higher outcomes has led to staff expecting children to do too much, too soon. Over recent years, at the Learning Academies Trust, leaders have been working to simplify Year 1’s English curriculum. This began by removing previous requirements to write genres in the autumn term, replacing these with sentence-level work focusing on transcription elements. Following the wise words of Mary Myatt as she ‘makes the case for less’, leaders and teachers have embraced a braver, pared-back approach that has led to greater achievements year on year. Doing too much, too soon, seems to be a familiar theme recognised by OfstedThe Office for Standards in Education, Children’s Services and Skills – a non-ministerial department responsible for inspecting and regulating services that care for children and young people, and services providing education and skills in their October 2024 report, ‘Strong foundations in the first years of school’ (Ofsted, 2024a), where they discuss their findings that ‘Curriculums are often overloaded with activities that do not focus on helping children to build fluency in foundational knowledge and skills.’

Our trust’s approach, however, encourages teachers to slow their writing curriculums down and strip them back, employing the old adage of ‘less is more’, which has resulted in a far more inclusive environment. Focusing on the component parts of English means that pupils can then increase the complexities of their writing later in the year, with a stronger underpinning of sentence structure. Ofsted (2024b) reports that ‘Pupils are more likely to be successful in learning composites if the components are broken down and sequenced over time, with sufficient practice to reach automaticity.’

Mapping the milestones

Working closely with colleagues from across our trust, the early years lead and I came together with a plan to map out suggested milestones in writing for our Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS) and Key Stage 1 teachers. Not only was this document created to support the transcription-focused writing discussed above – which we know from Berninger et al.’s (2002) work on ‘the simple view of writing’ is a fundamental piece of the puzzle that underpins composition later – but it would additionally act as an aid for Key Stage 2 teachers who were finding inclusionAn approach where a school aims to ensure that all children are educated together, with support for those who require it to access the full curriculum and contribute to and participate in all aspects of school life in English lessons challenging, with a spectrum of learners working at different stages, often significantly below their peers. Our ‘Writing Milestones’ document has mapped out the developmental expectations for nursery children up to Year 2 for writing, alongside oracy objectives and storytelling expectations. This provides a clear pathway, which outlines the development of children’s early writing journeys and can be used as a diagnostic tool by teachers to assess, pitch, scaffold or adapt work to meet the children’s needs, ensuring that the curriculum is fit for all. Teachers can track back through the guidance easily, identifying the stage of writing that a child is at in order to meet their needs and progress forwards appropriately.

ScaffoldingProgressively introducing students to new concepts to support their learning through toolkits and metacognitive talk

Scaffolding writing for children working significantly below their peers can be complex, but the trust has seen the most impact when building on the transcription-heavy approach that is mapped into our EYFS and Year 1 classrooms. Teachers have found that, after a number of progressive weeks of identifying sounds and writing CVC (consonant-vowel-consonant) and CVVC words, two- and three-word captions and labels, the introduction of a basic pictorial toolkit – with symbols for capital letters, finger spaces and full stops, etc. – supports children’s metacognition well. Alongside this, clear oral rehearsal and direct instructionA method of instruction in which concepts or skills are taught using explicit teaching techniques, such as demonstrations or lectures, and are practised until fully understood by each student, through the use of the gradual release method (using the ‘I do, we do, you do’ method, with modelling and shared writing), provides an explicit approach to sentence construction. Taking into account many of the Education Endowment Foundation’s ‘Metacognition and self-regulated learning report’ summary recommendations (EEF, 2021a), once teachers model the metacognitive talk around the toolkit’s use, children learn to use it to self-regulate their learning and, in turn, this promotes independence and motivation.

Transitioning from EYFS to Year 1

Writing is a complex skill with multiple components, as expressed in Joan Sedita’s diagram of the ‘Writing Rope’ (2019), and unless it is approached developmentally and progressively, it can lead to children developing gaps and misconceptions and ‘running before they can walk’. Of course, this has come to the forefront over the last year, with the publications of the Ofsted reviews ‘Telling the story’ (2024b) and ‘Strong foundations in the first years of school’ (2024a). It was evident from the immediate post-COVID years that the transition into Year 1 needed to continue to build on the strong foundations laid in EYFS. With the amendments to the trust’s overview for English units, Year 1 had more time than ever to dedicate to sentence-level work to ensure that the basics were well and truly in place before moving into more complex genre-based work. The EEF’s literacy report recommendations (2021b) include developing ‘pupils’ transcription and sentence construction skills through extensive practice’.

Unit design

Building on insights from our successful Systematic Synthetics Programme, we observed that children thrived when repetitive work reduced cognitive load. In response to this, we designed units in a predictable pattern with just the core text changing. This reduction in the cognitive load of the structure of a unit and lesson, combined with a focus on the fundamental components of literacy, has led to reaching automaticity in writing more easily than before because, as Ofsted state, children ‘do not need to use working memory to anticipate what might happen next: they are familiar with the lesson’s structure, routines and opportunities for repetition’ (2024a).

Continuing to use a pictorial toolkit in Year 1 to support the construction of oral and written sentences, as they had in EYFS, was also a non-negotiable element of the curriculum for us – as was the use of modelling through the gradual release method (Fisher and Frey, 2013), where independence is transferred after direct and guided instruction. What we were mindful of, particularly in Year 1, was the need to link the sentence work to high-quality picture books, which would support the more complex writing application later in the year and ensure that the children were exposed to a rich and varied range of text structures and vocabulary. Oracy continues to be the bedrock for our reading and writing, acting as the golden thread, with abridged versions of the core text rehearsed orally and text-mapped to support the acquisition of language and story structure.

Adaptive practice 

Once these strong foundations were in place, the work of EYFS and Year 1 was used as a blueprint to support children in Key Stage 2 who were working significantly below their peers. The need to ‘catch up’ after COVID, and perhaps a misunderstanding of curriculum equity and inclusion, has led to some children not having their gaps in understanding reduced. Teachers have felt the pressure to try to keep everyone on the same page, and Ofsted (2024a) reports similar findings: ‘Schools typically do not provide enough explicit teaching or opportunities for pupils to practise the knowledge and skills that are not yet secure.’

Santangelo and Olinghouse’s research (2009) suggests that if pupils do not secure the building blocks of writing – spelling, handwriting and sentence construction – then they are at risk of writing difficulties. Our approach, based on these building blocks, supports pupils working at EYFS and Key Stage 1 levels to remain alongside their peers in Key Stage 2 classrooms. Using more sophisticated-looking versions of Key Stage 1 pictorial toolkits and orally rehearsing stage-appropriate sentences enables pupils, wherever possible, to work in the same context as their peers. Tracking back to sound- and word-level work, using colourful semantics where necessary, to support the grammatically correct construction of sentences, means that there is a route into writing for everyone and gone are the days of copying from mini whiteboards outside of the classroom.

Conclusion

Cross-trust moderation of the Year 1 books showed the clear impact of how focusing for longer on transcription work during the first part of the year has gone on to support pupils to write with greater, more accurate outcomes later. Additionally, teachers were overwhelmingly positive about stripping back the curriculum in Year 1, and where we have had mixed Year 1 and Year 2 classes, Year 2 pupils have benefited from the focus on sentence-level work too. Could they remain engaged in the approach throughout the whole year? Might this be a potential approach for all year groups for a term or two? We are undecided, but perhaps the new writing framework, due to be released in the summer, will support our thinking further.