The most fundamental goal of the National Curriculum for English is for children to learn to communicate and engage with the world around them confidently and effectively. Our ambition is that pupils will learn to do so meaningfully and with purpose through the high quality structures and strong ambition in the CUSP English provision.

The aim of CUSP Writing is to provide teachers with the tools to explicitly teach pupils the knowledge and competencies that they need about the different facets of writing and the writing process. The subject knowledge required in order to deliver the Primary curriculum for Writing is vast.  CUSP Writing synthesises the multiple aspects of knowledge and competency needed to write effectively and sequences these, using all that we know about cognitive science to ensure that pupils embed learning into the long-term memory.

Cognitive science tells us that pupils need multiple exposures to key concepts in order to commit them to the long-term memory. We also know that some concepts in the Writing curriculum are more high-utility than others. Historically, pupils memorising text conventions has been over-emphasised, often at the cost of sentence level mastery. This has resulted in many pupils travelling through primary school without securing a really strong foundation in the basics. CUSP Writing is built on a Reduce and Revisit model. This means that  the number of text types that pupils study are reduced, in favour of revisiting a small number that we want them to truly master. These text types have been carefully selected to ensure balance and progression across the whole of the primary journey.

Pupils will study each text type twice in each year – Block A and Block B. Block A is the first time that pupils will meet the text type and its associated concepts. Block B allows pupils to reflect on what they already know about this form of writing and build on this more independently and more creatively, as their confidence develops.