On a crisp autumn day back in September 2013, Michael Tidd - then a Year 5 teacher in a large Sussex primary school - sat down to consider how he could improve the teaching of writing in his school. He was sitting in his classroom at the time, although he later continued the work at home and in the school PPA room. This was because he wanted to ensure that children not only improved their writing, but could retain that knowledge for future year groups.

When asked if she remembered the genesis of his ideas, his wife, Rhoda, 34 (shh!), said “Hmm…no.”

Okay, enough of the claptrap. You’ll hopefully have noticed by now how out of place the paragraphs above seem. Those of you used to teaching in key stage 2 may also have noticed how well I’ve followed the standard rules for writing a newspaper. An opening paragraph that tackles the infamous “five Ws” (Who, What, Where, When, Why), swiftly followed by a quotation from an eyewitness, using appropriate speech punctuation.

The problem is, hardly any newspaper articles fit this model. After all, why would they? Particularly in these days of rolling news and social media, hardly any news articles are really reporting something completely new to the reader. And while we’re at it, real journalists don’t handwrite in columns either…or draw their own pictures!

Of course, we all liked the standard structure because it was something teachable, and it prepared children well for the writing test. The fact that we’ve not had a writing test for nearly a decade now is academic; it casts a long shadow over the whole system.

Audience in mind

My preference now is to focus on the purpose and audience of any piece of writing. When it comes to newspaper articles, that just highlights how foolish it is to consider a simple structure as the go-to approach. Newspaper articles serve a whole host of purposes, and their form should be adapted to those needs.

The five Ws might serve when writing to inform the audience of information, but what of articles intended to entertain? An opening quip or anecdote seems far more likely. Persuasion might be the name of the game in other columns - and goodness knows we need to teach children that some newspapers go out of their way to shape views rather than report objectively. And any newspaper will carry articles that express opinion or comment - either with or without balance - that don’t conform to the standard layout with quotations and eyewitnesses.

Without the straitjacket of the writing test, we can move away from those oversimplified lists of features of umpteen genres of writing. Genres don’t exist in reality. Nobody outside of schools talks about “non-chronological reports” - they’re just reports, and the language they use will be far more dependent on audience and purpose than on their chronology or lack of it.

And don’t get me started on diaries. Why we ever taught diary writing as a specific genre is a mystery to me. For a start, the very nature of a diary implies that it should elude the best of efforts to pin down success criteria. The whole point of them is that they are, in the main, personal. If you choose to keep a diary referring to yourself in the third person, then feel free - it’s your diary. There are no hard-and-fast rules.

The last children to sit a KS2 writing test will finish their A levels this summer. The writing test is long gone - and it’s time we said goodbye to simplistic writing genres, too.

Michael Tidd is headteacher at Medmerry Primary School in West Sussex. He tweets @MichaelT1979