Modelling Matters: Thinking about writing in Year 6 English lessons

Guildford High School is an independent day school for girls aged four to 18. There are approximately 980 girls overall with almost 300 in the junior school. Although entry is dependent on selection, there is a broad range of attainment within each year group. The junior school participates in the assessment and reporting arrangements for Maths and English at the end of KS2, and our writing is assessed against the three standards of attainment in the English writing framework. We are constantly searching for effective teaching strategies that will maximise our pupils’ potential in writing. I chose to scrutinise my class’ first pieces of independent work to initiate a focus for improvement. My year 6 cohort had no problem generating ideas for written tasks. However, when expressing themselves, pupils tended to revert to certain behaviours. Some splurged ideas, whilst others relied on a formulaic style which involved simple sentences. I deconstructed pre-written examples to dem