At The Good Shepherd we want all our learners to see themselves as writers and enjoy writing. We want them to understand the purpose and value of writing and have a variety of engaging opportunities in which to develop and apply their writing skills within writing lessons, across the curriculum and at home. The writing skills they acquire through Quality First Teaching, will support them in their future as life-long learners and writers.

Within writing, our key aims are:

• To enable children to use spoken and written language effectively in their lives, facilitating communication, self-expression and learning.
• To enable children to enjoy literature of all kinds and become appreciative and competent readers and writers.
• To equip our children with the necessary spoken, written and reading skills to enable them to be confident, articulate, adaptable and resilient learners throughout their lives.

At The Good Shepherd we recognise that reading underpins the writing process.. Children can only write successfully if they have a full understanding of the features of specific genres and therefore reading and exploring texts is closely linked to writing opportunities within lessons. We use the CUSP Writing resource and programme.

CUSP Writing is carefully planned, with a progressive sequence of lessons which provides opportunities to explore writing conventions, which are embedded, and apply them into writing for a range of real-life audiences.  Skills and outcomes are revisited to practise and consolidate learning. The explicit teaching of grammar is embedded across our lessons in a way that links both to the engaging context of the text and to the purpose and audience that children are writing for. This provides meaningful motivation for children to attend to and use these conventions in their writing. Opportunities to write frequently are also provided as these are positively linked to teaching pupils to write effectively.

At The Good Shepherd we are developing our pupils' oracy skills. We recognise pupil’s ability to manipulate their spoken language alongside learning through deep listening which will impact directly upon their ability to write for a range of purposes. We have a heavy focus on vocabulary; children are excited about learning new vocabulary, the subtle differences between synonyms and the etymology and morphology of words. We encourage pupils to use high level vocabulary within both their spoken and written language.