Musings of a Moderator

We like this time of year. Y6 moderation time. And although this year is different in many ways, essentially we get to spend the next few weeks reading children’s writing and this is still the best part of the job of being a literacy consultant.

This year’s assessment has raised many questions about the teaching of writing and many have argued that the requirements of what it means to be an effective writer have been marginalised. Indeed the tick sheets that appeared at the time of the exemplification publication would indicate that it has been stripped to the bare bones. But we are not going in hunting for hyphens. We maintain that we will start by reading whole pieces, getting a sense of the writer. Is that allowed? Of course it is. Has anyone told us to do that? No. But if we didn’t do that, then we wouldn't know if any of the grammatical devices that children would be using would be helping with the meaning. A semi-colon can be a beautiful piece of punctuation, if placed carefully and for effect – but not if it’s dotted liberally around the page for the sake of inclusion. Of course we’re not about telling children how they should write but if they have the right contexts and opportunities for writing, then the word choices and the punctuation will happen because they are right for that purpose.

And the purposes! We’ve seen some wonderful purposes and opportunities for writing this year that have helped us to confirm that we no longer need to write about Miptors, queues and Pip Davenport!* If anything, we’ve been able to see the writer in the child as we’ve had the chance to look over many pieces, rather than just one or two. Not only did we find carefully crafted journalistic pieces with bias based on well-known traditional tales (which are ideal for showing the formal and informal balance of writing needed for greater depth), but we saw obituaries for mythical gods! We’ve seen longer narratives than ever before, some where children have had the opportunity to write over several sessions and where they have used an engaging narrative to drop in a hidden chapter or rewrite from another perspective. We’ve seen witty and colourful pieces of exchanges of speech - many of which has jumped off the page with characterisation - and stories set in historical and fantastical times based on picture books where there are no words. One school we went into let children write three different endings to a story: a happy ending; a cliff-hanger and a sad ending, all which cumulatively showed us how they manipulated grammatical devices for different effects (another requirement for greater depth). Of course all of these contexts for writing have been up to the teacher, not dictated to by STA and the best ones have let the writer come out.

The composition and effect is not absent in this framework, but it is inferred. It will always the foundation for good writing that has purpose and despite it not being something we can tick off, if we maintain that the right context is chosen, then our children will continue to be engaged writers.

*References previous writing tasks when teacher assessment was not used to assess writing at KS2