Just cried over writing expectations for KS2 versus reality

[AtomHeartMotherOfGod]

I'm a teacher, Y4.

I was just marking my kids' recent work, and got so depressed about the spelling and grammar on show, it made me sob.

I'm only in my second year of teaching, so am still quite inexperienced, but I'm really down about this. The curriculum requirements are so clinical - they are beyond (what I have daily proof of) what many adults are capable of, but have to be used habitually by 8-9 year olds before I can grade them as 'meeting the required standard'!

I kind of have some ideas for redressing it but I can't help feeling I'm failing them when the errors keep cropping up. I'll go round and give verbal feedback and even then some children don't edit for what I've pointed out. I can't get round to speak every child in a lesson... I just feel like Sisyphus pushing the same messages over and over and nothing seeming to stick.

Just needed to let out emotion but would welcome advice or any words of encouragement.

Atom if I have five students in a class act on my feedback (secondary teacher here) it was a wildly successful round of marketing. You, clearly, care in spades OP and are keeping up your half of the deal - you can’t correct for D of E f*ckwittery.

Lean in to your IRL colleagues and ECT mentor. Teaching can chew you up and spit you out if you’re not careful - they’ll know your cohort, so might have some tailored strategies, but also they make tea. They can lend board markers. Help with IT issues. They’ll keep you sane.

Also, make a point of looking out for the amusing/charming things your students do and share them with your colleagues. Reminds me on the daily how freaking great our kids are!

I don't want to defend the detail of what is in the curriculum, not least because I don't really know other than having heard stories of the dreaded "fronted adverbial".

However, I think it is right in principle that the requirements of the curriculum are higher than the standards exhibited by many adults. Many adults have appalling grammar and spelling. Obviously in some cases there will be SEN issues, but not for all. We should be trying to ensure that today's children are better educated than their parents.

I'll go round and give verbal feedback and even then some children don't edit for what I've pointed out.

These are still small kids and they want to play rather than go through their mistakes:) I think the schools should organise over and over again dedicated sessions to "Check your work". Reward then for doing it with some sort of rewarding system and competition.

If it helps - as the parent of a very dyslexic child now in KS4 - it might be worth your looking at what is recommended to help SpLd kids as it would probably benefit them all.

Things like having a laminated sheet of high frequency words definitely helped my DD.

Scrap cursive and teach them to print and touch type (huge improvement for us with touch typing).

Focus on a few key words for those who really struggle - a sea of red pen just makes DC give up as they feel the mountain is too high to climb.

Ultimately in today's world you can cope with poor grammar and spelling because we have access to amazing tech. More important is to protect confidence and self-esteem as if a child gives up, deeming themselves useless and stupid, they will suffer far more than if they just spell things badly.

@OhCrumbsWhereNow that’s fine, but the requirements of the curriculum, Ofsted and the school, mean that OP can’t just ignore cursive writing or offer touch typing. High frequency words are useful, of course and helpful to all pupils, but the OP is matching her marking to the standards she is required to get her class to achieve and, of course it’s dispiriting if they are not seeming to make progress.

Yes, you can cope with inaccurate spelling and grammar and clearly, many adults do. That is apparent in many posts on here or on FB or other platforms. It still doesn’t mean that OP can ignore it in her teaching.

Cursive isn't required - DD's primary only taught print.

Frankly all schools should teach touch typing - far more useful in the real world. Plenty of schools are moving to laptops instead of hand-writing.

I can remember feeling like this as a parent of a pre-sats child, but all of a sudden, when they got towards the end of year 6 they flew through sats. I volunteered a little, and always noticed that the kids who did well with spag were the kids who read a lot at home. May be set up some incentives and challenges for home guided reading?

Can you provide feedback to parents about repeated mistakes and get them to work on it with their kids. I would absolutely be receptive to this as a parent,I’d rather be given an opportunity to work on it with my child than hear about it at the end of the year.

Interesting approach from the school, given that one of the standards the children have to meet to get ‘expected’ is ‘maintain legibility in joined handwriting when writing at speed’. Unlikely the majority of children will manage that if they don’t ever teach joined writing.

Whilst I agree that we should be aiming for our children to write better than the majority of adults currently do, I don’t think year 4, or even year 6, is the age they should be expected to do this! They have still have all of secondary school to develop these skills. It’s crazy to expect 9 year olds to write better than adults in my opinion.

Sympathy OP. It’s bloody difficult. And yes, getting children to edit their work and respond to feedback in any meaningful way is also a battle. Is there another y4 teacher you can talk to and ask for support? If not, the y5 teacher or English lead might be able to help?

That's it @modgepodge - I am a massive pedant and I totally agree we should have high expectations, but it's the age at which the guidelines expect things to be 'mostly there'.

I'm really grateful for the advice and many of these things we are doing already. Some of them are a case 'you can bring a horse to water'... a lot of kids sort of 'run away' from the reality of their work and so don't use things like the common word lists that we give them. Such a tightrope! I'm going for lying to them about their performance 😂and giving encouragement, more dictation of skills/spellings they need but that don't often come up, and teaching editing explicitly.

I think for the ones that could be GD I'll start up an optional creative writing homework task. Parents evening soon so I will be passing on advice.

Thanks again everyone! We'll get there.

Of course you will and they’ll be grateful for your diligence in the end.

My son is year 4 and I recently got him to write a diary of what we did during our holiday. Five days of what he did, how he felt etc. It was fucking torture. They'd been doing diary writing in class and I thought he'd be able to do it with a little help. He needed constant help. I had to spell most words. He struggled to write a paragraph. He's a bright child and can read well (but is slightly behind) and his maths is fantastic but lockdown did a lot of damage to his education. He missed more school than most due to the GP refusing to diagnose him with a health complaint that resulted in more Covid tests than I care to remember and so many missed weeks of years R and 1. The spellings they are expected to know are ridiculous when they can't spell words such as then or went. He often gets 10/10 on the weekly spellings of words such as technology but basic words? Forget it.
Teachers deserve medals. We need more teachers and smaller classes an d better discipline. Ds is constantly distracted by those with behaviour difficulties. Around 1/5 have additional needs. How on earth are children expected to succeed in classes of 34 with challenging children in such high numbers? It's a good school too.

my handwriting became relatively legible when I started writing letters in a disjointed but close to each other. Before nobody could decipher it. lol

Yeah I don’t get the obsession with joined writing either 🤷‍♀️ just pointing out it is a national curriculum requirement that y6 pupils are judged against however, and theoretically those who print cannot meet ‘expected’.

It's honestly really weird.

My DH does joined-up writing and it's like a spider crawled across a page after falling into a bottle of ink.

I've never done joined-up, have printed all my life and get endless compliments on my beautiful handwriting and asked to write things for printing by multiple organisations I've worked for over the years (I always thought it looked babyish and rounded and not very elegant, but apparently not...) and teachers and examiners loved marking my scripts.

You can teach a form of joined-up that doesn't have all the weird flicks and curly bits and would probably tick the boxes for DfE.

Creating confident happy little learners is honestly more important for kid's long term growth than their spelling test results, even if OFSTED don't agree. My eldest has SEN and hates school, he couldn't meet a lot of the writing requirements for SATS and still couldn't now at age 12. No amount of correction by his teachers helped. Lots of kids will have undiagnosed learning differences because schools don't have the funding or access to specialist support to pick it up.

Also, part of my son's SEN is poor working and auditory memory with distraction - he can fully intend to edit his work, and can if asked immediately repeat back what you said, but five seconds later his neighbour makes a silly noise and drops their pen on the floor and unless he has visual cues he has completely forgotten what you told him. Schools are not great environments for learning for him!

Just keep going. Try and present the same things in different ways so kids don't feel like they are being told the same thing over and over. Certainly don't take it personally that many kids can't meet the completely unrealistic expectations put on them. Or on their teachers.

He couldn't pass year 6 writing two years on that should say, he is now in year 8. Doesn't have to write dire Allen Peat and Adspicen sentences all day now though, and after some arguing, has his own laptop for lessons.

The current year 4 are the cohort who lost Reception and Year 1 to the Covid lockdowns and there is a national issue with the gaps in their knowledge as a result of missing these crucial foundational years. Their KS1 SATs results were clear evidence of this. In other words, it’s not you!

You need to seek support from the phase leaders at your school to carry out a really honest assessment of the gaps in your children’s learning. If they are anything like many of the y4 that I see across my trust then they may still be securing KS1 content. There is absolutely zero point in pressing ahead with LKS2 content if they haven’t secured KS1; it is the equivalent of trying to put a roof on a house with no walls.

A teacher has to follow the school policy regarding handwriting etc. They can't just follow random advice on the Internet.

Year 6 teacher here… cursive is required to meet age related expectations in the writing at the end of Year 6.

To the OP, your Year 4 class don’t need to be mostly there with the end of Key Stage assessment objectives. They’ve got 2 years to go.

Focus on nailing the basics:

• basic punctuation (full stops, capital letters, exclamation marks etc)
• sentence structure (does it make sense?)
• handwriting (ignore the debate about cursive, teach what your school policy says)
• tense

The curriculum is full of lots of things that they will eventually get but for now, the most important thing you can do is get them writing clear, well-punctuated sentences that make sense.

This thread makes me sad at the curriculum insisting that handwriting is so important that children and teachers are tearing their hair out over it, when as soon as they leave school, the amount of handwriting most people will need to do is negligible. I'm absolutely sure one of my primary aged children has dyspraxia and dysgraphia. The constant corrections and negative focus on his handwriting has eroded his confidence with all areas at school.

Maybe I tell you what helped my son(y6) in writing. He has dyspraxia and attention problem. He was below expectation in writing. I got him a tutor - A level pupil who passed English at GCSE with 9. Twice a week they connect online . I pay to her £15 per hour. She is teaching him writing. He is typing and she gives him guidance.

At the beginning he was writing 2-3 sentences. Now after 6 months he is typing whole page within 45min with her minimal help.

It is all about practice and the right person who can encourage him to focus.

This is incorrect. Children in English state schools cannot achieve the expected standard in writing at the end of year 6 unless they demonstrate that they can join consistently and legibly.