From Year 1 to Year 6, our writing curriculum at Southgate Primary School is taught using ‘Curriculum by Unity Partnership’ (CUSP). CUSP is an ambitious research and evidence based approach which is built around the belief that every child should be taught the key skills and techniques to be able to communicate effectively in their writing. Our curriculum is carefully structured to ensure pupils build upon prior knowledge to master writing and develop their ideas.

The CUSP writing curriculum has been designed as a progressive, coherent yet flexible curriculum, which aims to extend, enrich and consolidate the learning of grammatical and compositional features to improve outcomes. Retrieval practice is used to solidify these new features for children to begin to use these independently in subsequent lessons.

At Southgate Primary School we believe that the development of literacy skills are central to improving the life chance for the children in our school and we recognise that these skills provide the foundation for all other learning. We strive to deliver a curriculum that gives the children every opportunity to become confident, literate, successful members of society with a love and deep understanding of English Language and literature.

Expert subject knowledge is carefully woven into each Writing unit, giving teachers the opportunity to teach and rehearse key knowledge and skills before children then apply this learning to meaningful, extended pieces of writing. This careful architecture of the curriculum ensures pupils revisit different writing genres twice in each year, to maximise the opportunities for progression and consolidate their skills, so they become writers for life. Within the CUSP curriculum, punctuation and grammar is taught both directly and discretely enabling children to see how it is embedded in example texts and then given the opportunity to apply this to their own writing.

Here is a link to CUSP for more information:

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Writing in Reception

In Reception we believe that to be a successful writer the children need to have both the desire to have something to write about, and the physical capability to master a writing tool. To inspire the children to write we carefully plan play opportunities throughout our learning environment so that children see writing as part of play, and a vital means to communicate. As adults, we model this by immersing ourselves in their play so we can model purposeful writing and encourage the children to follow our lead.

In our continuous provision we follow the GLF Primary Curriculum, which uses high quality texts to expose children to rich, exciting vocabulary, and then gives them an inspirational theme to write about independently. In addition to this, we follow Read Write Inc where children are able to practise their handwriting every day. This approach not only exposes the children to a range of new vocabulary whilst providing a purpose for mark making, but also provides an extended period of time where children are using mark making tools and developing their fine motor control and pen grip. As the year progress, children will take part in activities where they have the opportunity to apply their developing phonic knowledge to a range of exciting writing opportunities, within all areas of the curriculum.