“Part of me feels it’s a very Victorian framework. You could almost imagine children sitting with their slates, doing their transcription practice,” says Debra Myhill.

She is speaking about the Department for Education’s new primary writing framework, which was released in July.

Myhill is professor emerita in language and literacy education at the University of Exeter, and a well-respected expert on the teaching and learning of writing. As the director of the Centre for Research in Writing, a position she held until recently, she led a decade of research into the development of children’s writing - research that has shaped national and international policy and changed classroom practice.

She was also a contributor to the government’s new writing framework, so it is perhaps surprising that she does not take a particularly positive view of this document. In fact, she describes the framework’s use of research as “problematic”, and suggests that it oversimplifies the complex process of learning to write.

“There is an overemphasis on the technical accuracy aspects, without paying attention to the idea of writing to communicate for a purpose,” she explains. “What you’ve got is what I call the ‘performative view’ of writing: it’s text focused, not writer focused.”

The non-statutory writing framework is set to be updated once the ongoing national curriculum review has concluded in the autumn, and a revised national curriculum has been drafted. Ahead of this, Tes spoke to Myhill about what, in her view, the writing framework gets wrong about writing, and how schools can use what it gets right as a springboard to improve their teaching.

Problems with the primary writing framework

Tes: Writing is a broad skill with a lot of components. So when we talk about “writing” in schools, what are we actually referring to?

Myhill: Writing is made up of multiple components, and I think that is what’s at the heart of some of the problems in thinking about how to teach it. So, to be fair, trying to create any kind of framework for writing is an enormously difficult task.

You’ve obviously got the transcription aspect of getting words on to a page or a screen. You’ve got spelling, which is a totally different learning skill from, say, imaginative ideas. You’ve got punctuation, which is about learning conventions, and, again, is different from spelling. You’ve got vocabulary. You’ve got understanding how texts are structured (what’s a narrative like? What’s an argument like? What’s a poem like?) And, along with that, there’s understanding purpose and audience (who am I writing for and what’s the purpose of this?).

There are also components about being a writer (what do I want to say? How do I want to position myself?) and components about ideas and arguments and the content of what you’re saying. And then you have grammar, which is often lumped together with spelling and punctuation, but that’s not really where I think it belongs.

How do you think we should be positioning grammar?

Grammar is often treated as being all about accuracy. But for me, grammar is part of understanding how you shape what it is that you want to say, through the language choices you make.

It’s a much more positive thing than “have you dangled a participle?”. I don’t see it as being solely about error correction. I see it as being about understanding better what it means to be an author, be a writer, and the language choices you can make.

Are there any other common misconceptions about the teaching of writing?

I think one misconception is that there is a silver-bullet, one-size-fits-all answer to what’s the best way to teach writing. There isn’t. It’s too complex for that.

Probably the biggest misconception is to think that you can set out everything children have to know, and then they will be good writers. Because if you’ve got your handwriting perfect and you can spell correctly and you’ve got some good vocabulary, it doesn’t necessarily make you a good writer. You can write perfectly accurate text and it can be mind-blowingly boring.

Simply mastering what you might call the “technical” parts of writing (the things you can be ticked right or wrong for) is a necessary part of learning to be a writer, but it’s not sufficient to be a good writer.

To me, the biggest misconception is that writing is simply mastery of a set of norms, rather than how you communicate and express things for different purposes and different audiences in an effective way.

The DfE has described the writing framework as “phonics inspired”. How important do you think phonics is for writing?

I’m not in favour of the way that in reading, phonics is everything. I think it needs to be phonics and enjoying reading. But phonics does have a place, I wouldn’t deny that.

What I have noticed, particularly looking at younger children, is that if they have done phonics, they’re actually quite good at trying to spell words that they’ve never seen. They’ll spell them wrongly, but as a reader you know what the word is, because they’ve used phonic representation. It allows them to get words on to the page and to communicate, even if it’s not yet accurate. That, for me, is a plus of phonics.

But the key thing about learning spelling is that children have got to move beyond phonics, because English is really not very phonic, and so phonics lets us down.

What do you think the writing framework does well?

One aspect of the framework is that it repeatedly says many positive and constructive things about teaching writing. However, this is not followed through in the examples that follow and in the appendices.

For example, in the first section, it talks about the importance of writing for life, both personally and in the workplace; the relationship between writing and thinking; the relationship between spoken language and writing; and the reading and writing relationship.

All that is absolutely great. But, in what follows, there’s no sense of how that plays out in what is being recommended. The framework talks about the importance of motivation to write, for instance, but then doesn’t deal with how you make teaching motivating. It doesn’t matter if you know that a particular teaching strategy works; if the kids are bored to tears and won’t concentrate, that strategy won’t work.

I would love for the framework to have lived up to some of the positive statements it makes about writing. But instead it goes on to make everything about technical accuracy.

Technical accuracy is still an important part of learning to write, though, isn’t it?

Yes, and one of the problems in some of the discussion around writing is that you get a polarisation that I think is really unhelpful. We’re constantly having the argument about there being no room for creativity and imagination, but it’s not a very constructive argument because there are all sorts of forms of writing that children need to learn that aren’t necessarily about imagination.

We also cannot argue that you don’t need to pay attention to spelling and punctuation and accuracy. I’m very keen to be positioned as someone who sees the value in learning the technical side, but that’s not the only thing that matters for writing.

‘One misconception is that there is a one-size-fits-all way to teach writing. There isn’t. It’s too complex for that’

If you’re writing a letter of complaint, what you’re really thinking about is getting the result that you want. How do you do that? It’s not just about creativity and imagination or about accuracy, which are both important, but fundamentally about expressing your own ideas and viewpoints or being able to make a text do what you want it to do.

Different types of writing (writing to argue or to inform, for example) are often taught in schools as distinct genres. Do you think that’s a helpful approach?

If you go back to the genre research, it splits two ways: an American way (which follows Classical Greek rhetorical tradition and is quite specific) and an Australian way.

I’m very pro the Australian way because they emphasise the need to be explicit about how these texts are typically structured, and why those language choices have a communicative purpose in that text, but that children also need to understand that it’s not a formula or a checklist for writing.

A really good example of this is if you look at a Mrs Beeton recipe book, a Delia Smith recipe book and a Jamie Oliver recipe book. They are all doing the same thing - effectively communicating how to cook to people - but linguistically, they’re very different.

If you look at the genre, all the recipes in these books fit the prototype of an instruction text, but they do it in different ways because of their audience.

Children need to be supported to understand why a particular structure or choice is typical for the text, but also to understand that there are multiple ways of doing it.

Do you think that the writing framework does a good job of summarising the key research on genre and other aspects of writing?

The use of research is problematic, and that’s partly because of what we said about writing being multidimensional. That means there is a whole body of research on spelling that you need to read thoroughly to understand the best way to teach spelling. And then there’s a whole body of research on genre, and a whole body on transcription.

To do justice to all that research in one document is hard. So, what you get in the framework is a sort of “potpourri” of research, pulled in here and there, willy-nilly.

But there is also a sense of cherry picking - of choosing research that already supports the way they want to present the framework.

They draw, in particular, from cognitive psychology. But there’s a whole set of research in linguistics - around language development, typical patterns in children’s writing, what happens at different ages and stages - that’s more or less not thought about. The framework also ignores the research that looks at the social context in which children write.

The other problem is that where it does cite research, it’s often wrong. It’s not just biased - it’s wrong.

Can you give some examples of that?

One example is that the framework talks about the “simple view of writing”, which is a relatively well-known but old, cognitive model of writing. According to the framework, the simple view of writing understands writing as being the product of two components: transcription skills and composition.

But that isn’t quite accurate, because the simple view of writing actually says that in order to learn to write on a page, you’ve got to be able to do three things: transcribe, compose and self-regulate. The self-regulation part is absolutely key.

The writing framework does acknowledge that researchers felt the simple view of writing was too simplistic and so formulated the “not-so-simple view of writing”. However, in the guidance they go on to give, they ignore this and come back to the basics of transcription and composition.

In other words, they haven’t actually used the research they’re citing to inform their recommendations for classroom practice.

You see the same pattern with how the framework approaches the idea of the writing process, which is made up of the steps “plan, draft, revise, edit”.

Research shows that this process isn’t linear, as these elements are all interacting all the time. The framework acknowledges that, but then goes on to offer lesson outlines that approach the process as linear, presenting the elements as distinct phases and suggesting that first you plan, then you draft, then you revise. The truth is, it’s much messier than that.

The other bit that’s really problematic for me is in the composition section.

Why is that?

The framework suggests that you’ve got to learn to write a sentence before you can compose a text, and that if children orally rehearse a whole sentence, they’ll then be able to write it. That might sound like common sense - but it’s not, because this isn’t what you do when you’re writing.

The evidence is that younger children are initially more likely to write word by word, or in clusters of words. And even as experienced writers, we very rarely prefigure a whole sentence. It tends to be a meaning chunk, often a clause, and then we add on to that.

There is a similar problem with the guidance on teaching paragraphs. It gives two models for writing paragraphs; basically, it says that every paragraph must begin with a “topic sentence”, which tells you what the paragraph is going to be about. Then you have three or four sentences elaborating and explaining, before you have a concluding sentence.

‘Where the framework does cite research, it’s often wrong. It’s not just biased - it’s wrong’

But on the very page on which they say this, there are paragraphs that don’t fit that model. How can you say that this is what children must be taught when you are clearly not doing that yourself?

It suggests a misunderstanding about the variety of choices for paragraphing in different texts. Paragraphs in narrative or information texts or film reviews, for example, do not follow this model structure.

The framework gets these things wrong, I think, because the way in which they’ve treated the research is a bit superficial. So it’s a missed opportunity.

The framework is set to be updated following the completion of the curriculum review. What would you like to see change that you would perhaps also hope schools would keep in mind when approaching the teaching of writing?

The main thing I would want to see change is a greater emphasis on composing as a communicative, meaning-making, expressive act, across all genres.

Writing is always communicating (even if it’s communicating with yourself, in a diary) and you really can’t play around with how you’ve written something until you’ve got something to say. You can practise sentences, making them longer and shorter all you like, but a sentence has no significance whatsoever until it is in a paragraph, with something to say.

For me, the complexity of composition and the idea of authorship are key; it’s about seeing the child as a writer and not just as a producer of a text. You must focus on the child as a writer, because that’s the other side of the act of writing.

There is a text, there is a writer and there is a reader. To be able to manage writing effectively, you have to take all those things into account. What do I want to say? And what’s the best way for me to say it to achieve what it is I want my reader to think?

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