Context

Weston Park Junior School is a Southampton primary with approximately 350 pupils on roll. It has just over 20 per cent of children with SEN and aims to work with its local community as much as it can to improve children’s learning.
The school was interested in running an Everybody Writes project to address writing as an issue in terms of engagement in the school. The school had also recognised that writing was an issue for the local community; there was a perceived lack of confidence in writing in parents. Weston Park also runs family literacy workshops in which there had been a significant uptake, so writing was identified as an area for development for the whole community.
The school felt that despite many efforts to engage children and the wider community in writing, the more traditional approaches being taken were not proving effective enough. It concluded that it would be helpful to explore more creative methods of fuelling engagement and excitement in writing. 

“We were doing a lot already, but it wasn’t having enough of an impact, so we wanted to do something different. We got some ideas from the Everybody Writes website and started thinking “We could do something like that,”   - Deputy Head

Aims & principles

The school wanted their first Everybody Writes project to be simple but effective. Therefore, a letter-writing project was chosen:

• As a response to the identified link between children’s’ and adults’ writing
• To make links to the wider community
• For children to learn how adults use writing for everyday purposes
• For children to enter into a dialogue with adults and each other about writing
• For teachers and the school to learn more about pupils’ aspirations and interests
• For children to think of themselves as writers
• For children to learn about functional letter-writing and sending and receiving letters in the post

The school decided to look at an area of functional writing that provided the children with a way to communicate with adults in the local community and beyond, and set up a dialogue with them about writing and how they used writing on an everyday level as well as how they used writing in their jobs. This would also make children think about what their aspirations were, who they admired and give them an opportunity to ask questions of adults who were doing the jobs that they were interested in. It was a simple but powerful project.

The school also wanted to run a project that would have a long-lasting legacy; it was felt that children receiving letters over a period of time would reinforce the children thinking of themselves as writers. It would also, potentially, provide a legacy of improved communication between the school and the community as well as improved writing skills and enthusiasm for writing from the children.

Summary

Every child in the school wrote a letter to an adult that they admired or wanted to find out more about. Children researched the person, found contact details, drafted and wrote the letter in “best”, addressed the envelope and posted their letters. They then received letters back from the people they had written to over a period of months and were able to reflect on the importance of writing in various professions - as well as enjoying receiving letters. 

In Practice

The project began with teachers running sessions centring on the conventions of letter writing and getting children to think about a person that they would like to write to. They thought about appropriate language and phrases used in letters, how to start a letter and how to finish it. 

Therefore, on the day itself, the children had all either decided on a person they admired, or a person that they wanted to find out more about in terms of what job they did, and the result was a range of local craftspeople, emergency services and people in the local community as well as celebrities and famous sports figures.

...the title for the day was “Everybody Writes - Don’t They?” and it was trying to find out what types of writing people use in their everyday lives, not because their teacher is making them sit down and write something but for real writing purposes. If you did want to be a professional footballer, do you need to be able to write? Hopefully the kids would hear firsthand whether they did or they didn’t. - Deputy Head

The main preparation for the day was finding contact details for the person the children wanted to write to. Support staff played a valuable role in ensuring that there was a name and a contact address for every single person that the children were going to write to. 

During the day teachers modelled the kinds of things that children might want to put in their letters. The children thought about what they wanted to ask, but they also thought about what they wanted to tell these people something about themselves. Teachers went through the drafting process with each group and the pupils wrote up their letters in “best”, on writing paper and then folded the letter into an envelope. They sealed their letters down and they stuck their stamps on the envelopes.

Some children were appointed ambassadors and went with a member of support staff to a letterbox and posted the group’s letters; some whole classes went down and took turns putting their letter in the box. 

“That was interesting for them because there were some responses like “Oh! That’s what it’s for!” - all connected to this idea of the project being real and purposeful and making the ordinary extraordinary. So they had gone through the entire process from beginning to end, although posting the letter wasn’t really the end - that was only the beginning! Every child who was at school on the day sent a letter. The post-boxes of Weston were bulging! There were 340 letters sent on the day.” -  Deputy Head

Outcomes

“The outcomes were amazing - they blew everybody’s expectations - and again, it was a case of making the ordinary extraordinary” - Deputy Head

When letters began to come back for the children, the school held the letters in the office rather than given out immediately to the children. Instead, letters were given out to children in batches at the end of whole-school assemblies and this had a real impact on the children.

It was amazing, calling children’s names out - and of course, the way that the letters were addressed to them, the way that their names were written on the envelopes, was a way they had never been addressed as before in their lives. Some of the children just sat there - they made no connection with their letter because they had never been addressed that way before - “Miss A Jones, Year 5 Pupil, Care of Weston Park Junior School”, for instance. There was a real sense anticipation - a lot of “Oh, I hope another one comes soon!”

There was such exhilaration - children running up the corridor to show people what had come in their letter, whether it was a sticker that the man in the angling club had included as a little gift for the person that had written to him, or whether it was a handwritten long letter from an electrician who was writing to a kid - he was amazed that the kid had written to him!

The letters said things like “your handwriting is beautiful” or “your letter really made me think” - all these compliments came through and made a strong impact on the children’s sense of self-esteem. - Deputy Head

 

Examples of the letters received back varied widely, but most of the letters received were personal and handwritten and answered the questions that the children had asked, although there were also a certain amount of standardised letters from celebrities that perhaps enclosed autographed photos. 

One example was a boy who could be described as disaffected and who found school very challenging place. He had written to a local carpenter, as he thought he might like to be a carpenter one day. The boy in question had considerable problems with self-esteem and was amazed in the first place that this person took the trouble to write back to him. 

The letter was excellent because it described how the man, as a carpenter, used writing, and readily admitted that he wasn’t fond of writing; but he nonetheless gave real and relevant reasons for having to write, one being writing out invoices for work done so that he could be paid. 

You could see with the boy that the cogs were whirring and it was all beginning to make sense. I don’t think he had anticipated that he would get a reply - I don’t know whether he thought we had sabotaged all the post-boxes in Weston and actually none of the letters were really going to be sent - but in terms of our credibility, it was great because he believed that we had done what we said we were going to do. That was really powerful. - Deputy Head

The staff also felt that the project enabled the children to see into a wider world, as letters had been written to people in the UK and internationally, which was tremendously valuable and interesting not only from a writing perspective but also for thinking about geography and other cultures.

The project had a high response rate and approximately 70 per cent of children received letters back from the people they wrote to.

Legacy

The letter-writing project also had some unexpected legacies. One boy who had written to local paramedics about their job received a letter from the paramedic team offering to visit the school with the ambulance to show all the pupils what their job was about. To some degree, then, the teachers wondered whether the project had not just had a positive impact on the children’s’ self-esteem, but that the people who had been written to also ended up feeling quite special themselves. Additionally, it was good to make links in the community as this could make pupils more ready for their secondary school work experience and create a positive relationship between the children and their future possible employers.

Resources

Resourcing and costs for the day were low and the only requirements for the project were writing paper, an envelope and a stamp for each child. Each class had their own sheet of stamps because each child stuck their own stamp on their letter.

Contacts

Emma Kerrigan-Draper, Deputy Head

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