In the 1950s and 60s when I was at school, there was a simple and basic way that English regarded the field of writing: it was made up of plays, poems, fiction and non-fiction. As a result, examples of these were put in front of us, and we spent time writing our own versions of these.
At the time, some teachers pointed out that there were other kinds of writing that were getting overlooked by this curriculum: song lyrics, TV drama scripts and that there was a general neglect of the field of 'orality' eg storytelling, everyday speech and telling anecdotes, wisdom carried in what people say in terms of idioms and proverbs.
Since 1988, various governments have taken it upon themselves to intervene in what was a rich dialogue between teachers, university researchers, teacher trainers and writers, as expressed through organisations like the Schools Council, the London Association of the Teaching of English, the National Association of the Teaching of English, the English Association, the English and Media Centre, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education and others.
Some of these government interventions have been disastrous: none so obvious than the SPaG, then GPS test in primary schools which has changed the meaning of the word 'writing' in primary schools. The so-called 'expected levels' of writing have skewed 'writing' to mean fulfilling the norms of the GPS test. Assessing writing has ended up as tick-boxing cgovhildren performing the right numbers of 'fronted adverbials', 'subordinate clauses', 'expanded noun phrases', 'embedded relative clauses' and so on. Pushed out of sight has been the sense that the purpose of writing might be to convey ideas, feelings, emotions, thoughts and experiences.
The present government has picked up where the others left off and produced a new Writing Framework. Again, the model is the one we have come to expect: people in government go away into a huddle, take 'evidence' and produce a 'report' that is a genre all of its own. It's not a book, it's not a speech, it's not the opening document for discussion. It's what claims to be some kind of defining and ultimate statement - in this case on 'writing'. We're not supposed to notice the arrogance of this. It's just become the norm of what we have come to expect since 1988. The 'huddle' will tell us what writing is.
As it happens, the 'huddle' seems ignorant of some key features of what writing is. Why is the sole focus of the document on standard English extended prose? If we just start with 'Literature', we know that it's made up of poetry, drama as well as fiction.
Is the message of this document that children shouldn't be writing poetry and drama? Really? If so, why not? What's the theory here? Pedagogic or literary?
The whole document seems to turn on the axis of the 'sentence'. As I've tried to show in the previous blogs here, I don't this is accurate. Writing is much more various than what is described here.
In a future blog, I'll take up the question of why a document written in 2025 doesn't seem to know about stylistics and narratology. These sounds like very dry, academic ideas but as I've tried to show in blogs and booklets, these ideas open up many fascinating and exciting ways in which we can talk about writing with children. One example: how do we get readers to want to know what comes next in a story? The best trick we have at our disposal is 'reveal-conceal' - a method of by which the writer 'reveals' something but in so doing 'conceals' or 'hints at' or invites the curiosity of the reader to want to know more.
It's great fun to experiment with this core idea of fiction writing. Think of the opening words of 'Hamlet' - 'Who's there?' The 'reveal' is that two people are on the castle battlements and that they want to know what's going on? The 'conceal' is that the writing doesn't tell us at that point what IS going on! As a result, we want to know.
If you're looking for this kind of suggestion, idea, thought in a document on writing given out by the government - like Macavity the cat, it's not there.
And so on we go, with government 'huddles' thinking that they know better than teachers, researchers and writers. The joke is that the document is itself a piece of writing. And as an example of writing, it is of course deadly boring! Whoever wrote it, knows how to write but doesn't know how to write, if you get me. They can string sentences along. They can 'demonstrate' and 'expound' but they certainly can't 'fascinate'. Lols. (Is 'Lols' a sentence?)
