Call for schools to explicitly teach writing across all subjects to improve declining skills

Schools are being encouraged to explicitly teach writing across all subjects in a bid to improve skills.

Rebecca Birch, a teacher and academic in residence at Queenwood school in Sydney. Picture: AERO

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Schools are being encouraged to explicitly teach writing across all subjects – including science, history and potentially ­standard maths – not just English, in a bid to improve students’ writing skills.

Schools that trialled the ­method, such as Queenwood girls’ school in Sydney’s north, showed a distinct improvement in years 7 and 9 NAPLAN writing scores and ­internal assessments since beginning in 2023.

Off the back of those trials, the Australian Education Research Organisation has released new guidance to support the explicit teaching and assessment of writing in subject areas other than English, in primary and high schools.

AERO chief executive Jenny Donovan said strengthening writing skills was a “national challenge” that could be addressed.

An AERO analysis showed that writing performance, even among high-performing students, had declined since 2011, particularly in terms of persuasive writing, and became more pronounced in years 7 and 9.

Last year’s NAPLAN results showed that almost one in every two year 9 boys found it difficult to write persuasively, or ­express meaning through their writing.

AERO chief executive Jenny Donovan.

“Teaching writing isn’t just the task of English teachers; it is an ­important skill in all subject areas and requires explicit and systematic instruction by both primary and secondary teachers,” Dr Donovan said.

She said writing was not necessarily a skill that students picked up naturally.

“By supporting all teachers – whether they are teaching ­English, science, or humanities – to feel confident teaching their students how to write well, we can build the foundations for clearer thinking, deeper learning, and lifelong success.”

Rebecca Birch is the academic in residence at Queenwood, where about 25 high school teachers have been trained in explicit teaching in the “writing-heavy” subjects of personal development, health and physical education, history, geography and English since 2023.

Students who were in year 7 in 2022 recorded a big shift in the top NAPLAN bands for sentence-structure and punctation, and an unexpected rise in cohesion – or how to string numerous ideas ­together – two years later in year 9.

In punctuation, there were 18 per cent fewer students in the second band, and 20 per cent more in the top three bands.

“Writing between years 7 and 10 can be really ignored until the high stakes kick in … When it comes to years 11 and 12, (teachers in all subject areas) start to see that it does have an impact,” Ms Birch said.

“We did a year of professional learning that started with quite basic knowledge around what a sentence actually is, which is something that our teachers, ­including our English teachers, hadn’t been taught as part of their initial teacher training.” Ms Birch added that writing had not been in the English syllabus until a couple of years ago. She said the initial ­responsibility of teaching writing should still be with English teachers, including modelling a piece of writing, giving examples and checking students have understood key features.

A PDHPE teacher, for example, can then reinforce that by asking students to write complex sentences about the content they’ve learnt from memory at the end of a class, and assess their writing as part of an assessment task.

“Now that non-English teachers have the capacity to assess writing and they have the ­technical knowledge to know if the writing is any good or not, they are able to include it as part of their ­assessment rather than having it as an invisible criteria,” Ms Birch said. “I would love to see initial teacher education focus more on the specific of literacy, not just paragraph planning.”