Over the last few years, I’ve led a lot of curriculum development work. Some of this was driven by schools wanting to shift their focus due to the 2019 Ofsted framework, some was commercial work, writing curricula for publishers. Over the last two or three years, I’ve been working with many schools to adapt and revise their curriculum to meet the changing needs of their cohort and focus on key, core skills. In my experience, we often include too much content in our curriculum, and I include myself here. As a result, we may find ourselves rushing through content to get through it all, sometimes at the expense of depth. For many years, I’ve talked about, “Do less, do it better”, about shifting our focus from cramming in huge amounts of content before children are ready, in the name of ambition, to teaching the children the key, core skills they need and ensuring that these are deeply embedded.
I’ve noticed the creep of the scheme into early years. If you know me well, you’ll know I’m ambivalent about schemes. I think they can provide a structure, but recently many have become more of a straitjacket. I have written published schemes, and it’s a challenge. You write for a “broadly typical” child in the year group (have you ever met a broadly typical child? Is there such a thing?), but no scheme has met the unique children in front of you, and this is where our professional knowledge and judgement should come in. It is up to teachers to look at any scheme and consider, “Is this right for the children I have in front of me right now?” Otherwise, we are simply deliverers of prescribed content, not teachers.
I’m in the privileged position of visiting many schools and seeing many different schemes, and I’ve noticed that some expect Reception and Year 1 colleagues to get children “writing in the style of…” a model text. It’s advice that probably works beautifully with confident writers in upper Key Stage 2, where children have the language, theory of mind, and self-regulation to hold a mentor text in mind and remix it with purpose. But when it trickles down to four- and five-year-olds, something important gets lost: their voice.
Dylan Wiliam calls this kind of drift a “lethal mutation”; a good idea, transplanted into the wrong context, becomes counter-productive (Wiliam, 2021).
Of course, we should expose children to a wide range of texts and genres, and share our love of books. Texts provide windows to a wider world, and reflect our own experiences. They allow us to explore themes and feelings in depth and talk about some quite complex concepts with young children. That’s an entirely different thing to “writing in the style of…”
By Years 5 and 6, many pupils can sustain attention, inhibit impulsive choices, plan, and review—core executive functions. They can juggle the demands of holding a structure in working memory while making vocabulary choices that fit the purpose and audience. In that space, “In the style of…” can be a useful apprenticeship move.
Our youngest children are somewhere else entirely. Executive function and self-regulation emerge gradually across early childhood and into adolescence (Harvard Center on the Developing Child, 2023). Working memory, inhibitory control and cognitive flexibility are still under construction at five; these capacities are shaped by experience, co-regulation, and play (Blair & Raver, 2015). Pushing complex, product-first tasks too early can swamp limited working memory and narrow children’s options to copy-and-comply.
Recent longitudinal work by McClelland and colleagues (2014; 2019) shows that children’s early self-regulation and executive function skills, such as attention, persistence, and behavioural control, predict later achievement more strongly than early literacy or numeracy scores. These skills are nurtured through play, movement, and warm, contingent adult interactions, not by premature formalisation of academic tasks.
Similarly, Whitebread and Bingham (2011) remind us that genuine school readiness is not about early performance of literacy routines but about developing self-regulation, resilience, and curiosity, the dispositions that underpin lifelong learning. When we substitute these developmental priorities for top-down writing demands, we risk undermining the very capacities that make learning possible. If, instead, we invest in co-regulation and sustained shared thinking now, alongside teaching some basic secretarial skills, the writing will come, and it will be more independent.
Across England, there’s well-documented pressure on children’s communication and language: The DFE’s own statistics reflect a growing number of children who are struggling with talking and understanding words, long waits for speech and language therapy, and schools reporting that new starters need intensified help with communication and self-help skills (ICAN, 2023; DfE, 2024). If our policy asks for more top-down writing, we risk asking the least-ready children to do the heaviest cognitive lifting, and we stifle the very thing we want to nurture in our youngest children. Their own, unique, authentic voice.
Authentic voice in early writing grows out of lived experience worth writing about, time to talk (and be listened to), movement and play that organise the body for fine-motor control, and models that inspire. Research linking executive function and language is clear: better self-regulation supports better language outcomes, and vice versa (Blair, 2016; Duncan et al., 2017). When we jump to tightly-specified forms too early, we reduce the talk, play and choice that cultivate these systems.
There’s emerging evidence, too, that writing outcomes are entangled with executive function components and transcriptional fluency (Graham et al., 2023). If automaticity in handwriting and spelling isn’t there, higher-order composition suffers.Not because children lack ideas, but because the bottleneck is motor and cognitive. Formalising KS2-style genre demands in Reception adds a second bottleneck: “do the handwork and pastiche this structure.”
A well-intentioned sequence designed for Year 5 (annotate a mentor text → imitate key features → innovate) gets relabelled as “mastery” and applied to Reception. But in EYFS the purpose is different. We’re growing communicators who understand that marks carry meaning, that writing solves real problems, and that their stories matter.
When the copy-first routine becomes the diet, children learn that success = sounding like the model. That’s the mutation: a strategy that fosters craft for older pupils turns into a silencer for younger ones.
Start with talk, movement and play (Harvard Center on the Developing Child, 2023). Write for real purposes every day and talk explicitly about why you’re writing. “I must write it down, or I will forget!”, or “Can you take this note I’ve written to Mrs X?” helps children to see that writing has a purpose. Protect time for drawing and mark-making. Co-regulate the process (EEF, 2024). Our time is limited with our youngest children, and we should spend it wisely, on what we know makes the greatest difference.
Inspection materials emphasise a coherent curriculum and everyday practice that meets children’s needs (Ofsted, 2025). None of this requires EYFS to impersonate Year 6; it asks for alignment that respects developmental starting points. Wyse and Hacking’s “double helix” reminds us that reading and writing develop together; motivation and authenticity are part of the science, not soft add-ons (Wyse & Hacking, 2021).
When I sit with a Reception child and ask about something they’re interested in, or what they’re doing right now, I’m tuning into the unique child, what inspires them, makes them tick, what they’re interested in, how they select detail, the way their drawing holds the story together. That’s the style that matters. Our job is to preserve that music while we quietly, consistently add the tools: sounds, spellings, letterforms, ways to make a sentence travel.

“In the style of…” can wait until children have enough control to play with it. Until then, let’s keep the promise of early writing: this is your idea, your message on the page, and I’m here to help you say it well.

References
Blair, C., & Raver, C. C. (2015). School readiness and self-regulation: A developmental psychobiological approach. Annual Review of Psychology, 66, 711–731.
Blair, C. (2016). Developmental science and executive function. Current Directions in Psychological Science, 25(1), 3–7.
Department for Education (2024). Early years foundation stage profile results: 2024. London: DfE.
Duncan, G. J., McClelland, M. M., & Acock, A. C. (2017). The development of self-regulation and executive function in early childhood. Child Development, 88(2), 544–560.
Education Endowment Foundation (2024). Improving literacy in the early years. London: EEF.
Graham, S., Harris, K. R., & Santangelo, T. (2023). Writing, executive control, and transcription: New insights from cognitive and educational research. Educational Psychologist, 58(1), 1–18.
Harvard Center on the Developing Child (2023). Executive function and self-regulation in early childhood. Cambridge, MA.
ICAN (2023). Talking Points: The state of children’s speech, language and communication needs in 2023. London: ICAN.
McClelland, M. M., Cameron, C. E., Duncan, R., Bowles, R., Acock, A. C., Miao, A., & Pratt, M. (2014). Predictors of early growth in academic achievement: The Head-Toes-Knees-Shoulders task. Developmental Psychology, 50(3), 767–781.
McClelland, M. M., Acock, A. C., Piccinin, A., & Stawski, R. S. (2019). Self-regulation and academic achievement: Longitudinal evidence from early childhood to adolescence. Developmental Psychology, 55(11), 2401–2413.
Ofsted (2025). School inspection handbook and early years toolkit. Manchester: Ofsted.
Whitebread, D., & Bingham, S. (2011). School readiness: A critical review of perspectives and evidence. University of Cambridge.
Wiliam, D. (2021). Creating the schools our children need. Learning Sciences International.
Wyse, D., & Hacking, C. (2021). The double helix of reading and writing development. Cambridge Primary Review Trust.