SCHOOLS across York will benefit from almost £200,000 in funding to help improve the writing skills of primary school pupils.

The Pathfinder Teaching School Alliance, based at Archbishop Holgate’s CE Academy in partnership with Huntington Research School and City of York Council have secured £196,000 from the Department for Education’s Strategic School Improvement Fund.

The result of the joint bid is to deliver a project to improve the progress of writing at

Key Stage 2 by developing independent writing skills.

Alex Quigley, director of Huntington Research School, said: “Huntington Research School is delighted to partner with Pathfinder and York City Council on this exciting primary writing project. It builds upon some excellent work already undertaken in a cluster of York primary schools that has helped support a very positive improvement in the writing outcomes of our local children. This larger project will be great for the city and we hope it will provide a great evidence-based template for improving children's writing.”

The project will run from January 2018 to April 2019 in 18 primary schools identified by the Government as needing support and will include intensive training for teachers of Years 4 and 5.

Jake Capper, Head of Pathfinder Teaching School, said: “We now have the exciting task of putting the plan into action.”

Following the work to improve progress in the first 18 schools, the aim of the project is to improve outcomes in all York schools through the sharing of successful approaches by trained teachers and also to enable York’s approach to improving Key Stage 2 outcomes support improvements across the Yorkshire and Humber region.

Cllr Stuart Rawlings, executive member for education, at City of York Council, said: “This will allow us to build on a small scale project we ran earlier this year which underpinned significant improvements in outcomes in writing in a group of our primary schools.

“After learning from other high-performing local authorities in the region and examining research, we applied the best practice which our schools welcomed and put in place.

"The successful bid is the first stage in a plan to develop a sustainable model for improving progress in literacy and numeracy across all Key Stages and especially for disadvantaged and vulnerable pupils.

"As a result, York will have a large group of primary teachers able to drive improvement in a critical area for all pupils."