In an article originally published by Education News, bestselling author of Teach them to Write and Founder of global edtech Writer’s Toolbox, Dr Ian Hunter examines why writing is becoming the overlooked skill, limiting student confidence critical thinking and long-term achievement.  In the process, Hunter reveals the surprising benefit writing offers in human development.  

Recently, UK author of the book Closing the Writing Gap Alex Quigley posed the question: ‘Is writing the neglected R in our classrooms?’  Is there a reason why maths and reading get all the attention, while writing improvement in the classroom seems to fall a distant third, or worse?

Quigley furnished a number of reasons explaining the lack of attention writing receives–many of which are recognised by researchers in the field: teachers don’t feel confident teaching writing, writing doesn’t rate highly in school inspections, writing isn’t a priority in school improvement plans, and above all else: writing is just plain harder to teach.

Of course, Quigly’s correct on all fronts.  Imagine you’re a classroom teacher in the West Midlands.  In front of you sits a class of 30 ten-year-olds: twenty of them think you’re a wonderful teacher, eight are undecided, and two of them are spying for their parents who have already written to the headteacher.  It is after lunch and you have to make a choice.  Do you: read them a chapter of Louis Sachar’s Holes; test them on their multiplication skills (which are already a bit potholed), or deliver a lesson on how to write an opening paragraph with greater clarity?

It’s not like having to select the winner at Eurovision.  You dust off the cover of Holes, turn to page 43, and start reading.  But does that actually solve anything?

A global writing crisis

Britain is not the only country where teachers are reluctant to teach writing.  A recent study of 4000 teachers in New South Wales, Australia, revealed 60% of them did not feel confident to teach writing in the classroom either.  Nor did this lack of confidence come from lack of duty.  The Australian teachers, like their British counterparts, were highly-committed professionals, but no one had taught them the necessary skills to do the task.  Writing instruction didn’t feature on teacher training courses anymore.

Yet, we’re caught in a trap.  Some might say: a perfect storm.  It isn’t just teachers’ un-confidence about teaching writing that’s the problem.  There are at least two additional forces in education that make this challenge particularly difficult to overcome.

We need to do better.  The 2022 government white paper Levelling Up the United Kingdom declared the aspiration that 90 percent of primary school children will be at the expected standard for reading writing and maths by 2030.  That’s the sort of target that would look great on Britain’s international education rankings, but there’s only one problem.  For that hard-pressed teacher in the Midlands, and many other teachers across Britain, the students-at-expected-standard rate teeters around 60 percent. To achieve a goal of 90 percent, it would take a 50 percent leap in school performance in four years.

Such a lift in school performance might be possible with sufficient planning, resources, training, newer computers and wholesome school lunches, but there is a deeper, more ingrained malaise that cannot be ignored.  One that is lurking ever-present as we sit reading Holes that Autumn afternoon: disadvantage.

The crux of the issue

For a decade the Education Policy Institute has tracked the disadvantage gap in England.  We know two things: the disadvantage gap has been widening since 2016, and is now at its highest in a decade.  And that gap reveals itself most strongly at GCSE level.  By the time students take their GCSE’s, disadvantaged students are already educationally 18 months behind their peers.  Much of that gap is entrenched by the time they left primary school.

The two subjects that play the most crucial role in this gap are mathematics and English.  Although the 2026 government white paper, Every Child Achieving and Thriving, makes a bold claim to halve the disadvantage gap by 2035, we won’t remedy that gap unless we tackle our students’ ability to write and express themselves clearly, strongly and deeply on a page.

Yet, students in England seem to lack confidence when it comes to writing.  The National Literacy Trust’s annual Literacy Survey in 2025 revealed writing enjoyment levels in our young people have halved since 2010.  And that halving carries with it a deep educational dilemma that drags like an anchor against any ambition to close a disadvantage gap or lift educational attainment in Britain.  As the National Literacy Trust so aptly put it: “Findings show that the writing crisis among children and young people in the UK continues into 2025, with writing and frequency at an unprecedented low. This deepening disengagement has concerning long-term implications for literacy and learning.”

However, as much as a lack of writing skill pulls down attainment and engagement at rapid rates, might the reverse also be true?  Might solving England’s writing problem deliver disproportionate wins?

AI’s place in our education system 

At a time when teacher workloads are under significant strain, AI in the classroom emerges as one possible solution.  For example, educational experiments with generative AI in different parts of the world have shown its ability, especially for teachers, to reduce time producing classroom resources, even aid curriculum planning.  And exploratory research developing AI tutor models suggests that these, too, could offer a relatively low-cost solution for replicating one-on-one guidance for students who are struggling.

However, researchers are right to also point out the dangers of generative AI in the classroom.  Like many innovations, AI needs to be handled prudently.  It is one of the reasons at an Education Technology conference in Singapore in 2023, I coined the phrase: Educational AI.  It’s what our research team at Writer’s Toolbox have been working on for over a decade, and it’s something we need to talk more about.  Generative AI models, like ChatGPT, Gemini and others are built to give accurate, detailed answers.  And they do this well.  But as any educationalist knows, knowledge is not the same thing as understanding.

Giving a pupil an instant answer using Generative AI can trigger cognitive offloading: the brain’s reasoning capacities disengage.  The result is that instead of laying positive brain tracks for growth and mental stretch, we begin patterning mental laxity and reluctance in our pupils.  Our raison d’être is to teach, which is why we want Educational AI as it’s cognisant of the learner and uniquely tailored to their needs.  It’s pedagogically rich enough to know when to give a suggestion, and intelligent enough to remain silent when required, letting the pupil rise to the achievement.

Writing is where these threads intersect.  As Quigley suggested, writing is the oft-neglected cousin in the three-r’s.  But mentally, writing is the cousin who comes bearing gifts.  For the rich treasure in writing is that writing itself is thinking.  It is in the act of writing that the brain’s mental muscles are activated, nurturing convergent thinking, associative reasoning, synthetic reasoning, critical-thinking, creativity and metacognition.  And as sentences flow on the page, our subconscious goes to work, offering up thoughts that previously remained concealed.  Researchers call this type of creative insight in writing ‘self seeding.’  Twentieth-century novelist E.M. Forster captured it perfectly in his 1927 work: Aspects of the Novel.  Wrote Forster: ‘How can I tell what I think till I see what I say?’

We have an opportunity as educators and policy makers and technologists to do more than quantify problems and set lofty goals.  We can use the tools we have at hand to attain the goals we wish to see materialise.  Writing is a crucial part of this strategy if we are to break the hold of disadvantage.  Our pupils deserve to have writing enjoyment and attainment levels restored, and so materially succeed at writing and see it and deeper thinking as a key lever in social and career mobility.  Technology that is design led can be part of this solution.  But our first step is clear: it begins with the teacher, the agent of change in our classrooms.  We must teach our teachers how to teach writing, once again.