KS3 Skills for Writing

Skills for Writing – The KS3 Writing Curriculum 

An evidence-based approach to accelerating progress in writing at KS3 

Learning to write is about learning to be powerful. When you can write confidently, you can make things happen: you can campaign for things that matter to you; you can present yourself and your personality in writing for job or university applications; you can express your deepest, most personal feelings; you can write stories and poems that make others laugh or weep. In fact, you can write to change the world!  

‘Skills for Writing’ is to help you become a confident, powerful writer. It sets out to show you how authors create and convey different meanings in their writing by the choices they make and invites you to consider how the meaning might have been subtly different had they made different choices.  

Our programme of study is very clear about how you can become a better writer, but it is not a recipe book or set of instructions for success. Writing is far more complex than that. We want you to think like a writer, knowing what choices and possibilities you have in each piece of writing, and being able to make and justify those choices with confidence. Enjoy the power! 

Developed in partnership with Professor Debra Myhill and her team from the University of Exeter, Skills for Writing is designed to: 

  • embed the principles of the Grammar for Writing pedagogy - trialled and proven to almost double the rate of writing progress at KS3 for a clear route to KS4 success 
  • teach grammar in a contextualised way - focus on effects achieved, so students have a wider range of techniques with which to craft creative, effective texts 
  • provide engaging and interactive lessons - and the many digital resources focused on building grammatical knowledge and improving writing 
  • motivate students to write independently - encourage students to reflect on their writing and understand how to improve with our range of auto-marked activities. 
  • provide a sequenced, progressive and challenging KS3 curriculum that will fully prepare students for the rigour of KS4. 
Unit 1 (Year 7)‘Alter Egos’ explores texts such as The Witches, Flip and Twilight. It looks at how the authors of these texts create pace and tension, engage the reader and use narrative voice and viewpoint to portray a sense of a split identity.
Unit 2 (Year 7)‘Writing the World’ looks at how people write about the world of nature in documentaries and environmental campaigns to understand how nature is described and presented in popular media.
Unit 3 (Year 8) ‘Spy Fiction’ explores the elements that make an engaging spy story, developing language skills in order to entertain and thrill the reader. 
Unit 4 (Book 8)‘Explain’ looks at how to write to inform and explain for different audiences by exploring some of the unusual activities some people carry out in their spare time.
Unit 5 (Book 9)‘News writing’ looks at the key features of newspaper reports, how language choices can be made to imply a point of view and influence the reader’s opinion and how to condense large amounts of information. 
Unit 6 (Book 9)‘Dystopia’ uses texts such as 1984, Animal Farm and Brave New World, as well as more recent novels such as The Hunger Games and Gone. It looks at how the authors of these novels create settings and histories for their dystopias and helps students to create their own dystopias to build a sense of fear within their readers.