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What’s new in Pathways to Write?
Navigating the guidance and support for teaching English can be really difficult for subject leaders. Recently published guidance reports such as The reading framework and The writing framework from the Department for Education, as well as Telling the story:
The English subject report and Strong foundations in the first years of school from Ofsted have given us a great deal of advice and recommendations about how to meet the expectations set out in the national curriculum.
However, when you’re leading on reading and/or writing it can feel a little overwhelming. It leaves you with questions like: have we got our writing curriculum right? Are we doing enough on transcription and the fundamentals of writing? And, how will Pathways fit with the most recent advice?
First thing to say is – we’ve got you covered! Our consultants have been working hard to digest, summarise, reflect and synthesise the information. We’re ensuring our training and school support focuses on recommendations from these reports and we’ve been publishing blogs, social media posts, live webinars and training sessions to support teachers. You may find our document summarising ‘The writing framework’ and Pathways to Write very useful. You can download it here.
Pathways to Write and our mastery approach is so important to us; it has been used successfully in over 1100 schools for numerous years so we want to tread carefully in making changes. There are so many strengths in Pathways to Write that we are taking Becky Francis’s approach of ‘evolution not revolution’ when making amendments. (A world-class curriculum and assessment system for all, November 2025, pg 13).
Firstly, we’ve looked at amending Y1 and Y3 units to give pupils the best start at the beginning of KS1 and KS2. These have now been published and are available on our platform.
All Y1 units have had their content pared back. As the writing framework recommends, ‘Pupils should not be expected to produce extended pieces of writing until they are ready. Instead, they should be given ample opportunities to practise their basic sentence construction skills,’ and this is the thinking we have followed with the Y1 unit amends. In each unit, an oracy outcome has been added in autumn and spring for those pupils who are not ready to write a short narrative; building towards this, oral rehearsal of sentences has been threaded through the lessons in the pathway with many opportunities for composing and writing sentences.
When pupils are expected to write a short outcome, the units guide teachers through the gradual release of responsibility* approach to modelled writing ensuring pupils are supported towards independent writing. I do/We do/You do examples are identified in several lessons in each unit. *EEF: Improving Literacy at Key Stage 2 Guidance report Page 26.
For these short tasks, the purpose and features have been thought through carefully to ensure they build to the final outcome, for example, if the outcome of a unit is to retell a story (orally or written) then the tasks in the pathway build writing in past tense and in third person. Everything suggested in these amended units is planned to reduce cognitive load of pupils and to build in opportunities for transcription practice.
A similar approach to amendments has been taken with the Y3 units to support pupils with the transition from KS1 to KS2.
Many Y3 teachers find pupils struggling to apply full stops consistently at the end of every sentence – even though they were able to do it in Y2 and met Y2 expected standard. This is often due to the jump in the curriculum expectations at sentence level; it impacts on cognitive load.
Composing sentences which include conjunctions, adverbs and prepositions to express time place and cause introduces pupils to another nine sets of words! It’s really no wonder pupils find it hard to work out where to add a full stop. The writing framework states on page 8 ‘the best way to teach pupils to write is by teaching them to master sentences’ and this is the approach we’ve taken within the Y3 units: explicit sentence practice through oral rehearsal, supported composition and opportunity to just write sentences.
The other amendments made to the Y3 units include:
- Changes to the Gateway keys to ensure a focus on foundational skills (sentences, punctuation, tense)
- Gateway tasks made shorter and more inline with the genre of the final outcome
- Opportunities to encourage oral rehearsal prior to writing
- Gradual release of responsibility approach to modelled writing applied to several of the shorter pieces of writing within a unit to encourage more supportive shared writing in the Pathway and greater independence in the final outcomes
- Clear instructions for editing and proof-reading
- Model texts now clearly set out expectations for final outcomes in terms of feature keys and mastery keys (these are created for non-fiction as fiction units encourage pupils to use the text itself as a model). An example would be Y3 spring 2 unit based on ‘Big Blue Whale’ which models for pupils how to write an information text based on sharks:
Like the curriculum reform currently happening, there are many steps involved in making amendments to a writing curriculum. Changes to Y2, Y4, Y5 and Y6 units in Pathways to Write are in the planning stage to ensure any amendments made are in line with the curriculum reforms. Reassuringly, the new Ofsted toolkit is seamlessly aligned with guidance in the writing framework ensuring that any recommendations being applied in schools will form the basis for meeting the expected standard in ‘Curriculum and teaching’. Pathways products will continue to grow and support you and will always be in line with the latest guidance. Visit our Pathways Platform regularly to access updates.
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