At Eastbury Farm Primary School, we believe that every child is a writer. We are passionate about developing every child’s knowledge, motivation and confidence in their writing.   We have chosen HFL Education’s ESSENTIALWRITING as the basis of our writing curriculum for years 1-6. This is an ambitious and progressive writing scheme which provides our children with opportunities and tools to write for a range of specific purposes and authentic audiences. As a result, our children feel inspired and ready to write high-quality outcomes within the classroom but also have the knowledge, strategies and confidence to choose to write in their own lives.  We follow a two year rolling programme to ensure children access complete coverage of the curriculum without unnecessary repetition. Medium term plans include adaptations to support with delivering a well-pitched curriculum within a mixed age class.

Each year group has 13-16 teaching units, all of which use diverse and high-quality literature as good examples of writing craft and to help to motivate or inspire children to write.

ESSENTIALWRITING is fully aligned with the National Curriculum for English including writing composition, vocabulary, grammar & punctuation for each year group.  Each writing unit is progressively structured and centred around the different writing purposes: to entertain; to inform; to persuade; to discuss. The writing purposes are also progressively sequenced across the school (see table,below). 

Writing purpose		Years 1&2	Years 3&4	Years 5&6
To entertain
To inform
To persuade
To discuss

Follow this link to access the statutory content of the English objectives within the National Curriculum:   English programmes of study: key stages 1 and 2 (publishing.service.gov.uk). The information below outlines our approach to the teaching of writing in each year group, which encompasses the teaching of the statutory content as outlined within the National Curriculum for writing for key stage one (Year 1 – Year 2), lower key stage two (Year 3 – 4) and upper key stage two (Year 5 – Year 6).  For this academic year, ESSENTIALWRITING is implemented in Y1 – Y6 but builds on the foundational learning from the EYFS.