This July, just as schools were preparing for the end of the summer term and we were thinking about the following few weeks when holidays could be taken, and life lived a little more freely, the DfE published The Writing Framework. It’s designed to go alongside The Reading Framework and, to emphasise that, has come up with A Simple View of Writing to mirror the simple view of reading. Why is it, I wonder, that we must deny complexity? (I know, I know, they say that it doesn’t imply that writing is simple but … )
I should have written about The Framework straight away. I intended to. But the thing made me so deeply angry that I decided not to write in the furnace of my rage but to give it some time to settle. I had not meant that settling time to be quite so long. Or that it should have allowed the sadness to creep in alongside the anger. I remain positive. The framework must be addressed, but I shall not write directly about it today, except to observe that it is not statutory. So let’s hold our horses.
In the meantime, let’s look at the bibliography. Will it give us some insight as to what has given rise to this document? Glancing down the first page, I spot Frank Cottrell-Boyce – ‘David Fickling lecture: Literacy, reading and children.’ It comes as no surprise that the quoted link is no longer available, but a quick search brings up an extract.
As I read it, I was suddenly reminded of a literacy conference focusing on creativity. It was held in London on the day after the attack on the Twin Towers and so the atmosphere was charged. David Almond was there and he spoke wonderfully about his visits to schools and how he shows children his notebooks. He showed one to us. It was messy. There were jottings and scribbles. He showed us how he sometimes writes with the page upside down. He mentioned the discomfort some teachers feel about this. And as the session continued, and more people joined the stage (perhaps it was time for questions?), two or three of them, slowly, but very deliberately, stood in front of David, with his messy notebook and his ideas of freedom and openness. There was something unsettling about this denial on that particular day. Despite lip service to something more humane, the drive for stultifying rules and mind-numbing drills remains. The reference to Frank Cottrell Boyce’s lecture is in the Framework’s bibliography but it is at all too easy to imagine its perpetrators, with steely determination, standing in front of it, so we can’t see.
Frank Cottrell-Boyce’s lecture tingles with joy, with passion, with humour. He reminds us how valuable stories are and how crucial it is to read aloud and how story is a way of opening ourselves up to others as readers and as writers. He reminds us how reading, and writing, are filled with unknown promise; he gently reminds us how, as teachers, we can find ourselves shutting all that down.
Let’s not allow ourselves to stand in front of the messy notebook.
Let’s be fearless.
Let’s step into the sunlight.