School Implementation
At last, a writing programme you can implement across an entire school. Writer’s Toolbox supports every teacher and every subject area: from the first year of primary school to the final year of high school.
Writer's Toolbox is a whole-school system. There’s a complete scope and sequence to direct student learning, professional development to build teacher capability, and support for leadership. All driven by an award-winning online writing tool backed by educational research.
Whole School Language
Want staff buy-in across the board? Writer’s Toolbox embeds a common language for writing across the whole school—rooted in easy-to-understand terms everyone can get behind.
We don’t frame writing skills in dense grammatical jargon. That era of education left behind a wake of confusion, teachers outside the English faculty feeling disconnected, and little change to student writing performance. Instead, Writer’s Toolbox talks sentence styles, paragraph types, style, structure, precision—the rules of composition. Established writing skills that support expression across all subject areas.
It’s a System
Writer’s Toolbox is not just a one-off intervention for English teachers, or a particular area of a school. Writer’s Toolbox is a complete writing system, which means it covers methods of instruction, whole-school language, the explicit teaching of writing, a full scope and sequence for every year level, online writing tools for teachers and students, real-time data for tracking student progress, and an implementation plan for school leaders.
All the parts of the system work together and support each other. The result—within your school culture—is a complete transformation in outcomes.
Crafted in What Works
When Dr Hunter assembled the Writer’s Toolbox system, he did so based on proven research into writing improvement—what worked in schools and education systems over the past 150 years. Then anchored Writer’s Toolbox in the rules of composition and explicit teaching of writing skills from the late 19th century. Layered into this is the work of Lev Vygotsky, Socratic method, Discovery Learning, and advances in neuroscience. The result is an educational intervention based on sound practice and evidence.
The way we work with your school and teachers is equally grounded in proven adult-learning methodologies. The work of Albert Bandura and Social Learning Theory; the work of thinkers like Edgar Schein, Peter Drucker, Kurt Lewin, and Charles Handy. Altogether, it makes an educationally powerful mechanism for change.
Scope and Sequence
Our writing scope and sequence covers every year in your student’s school journey. And for each year, we’ve detailed the specific writing skills to be taught behind the delivery of content. We make learning discrete and practical.
At Writer’s Toolbox, we don’t just tell you a Year 7 student should be writing paragraphs—we tell you what type of paragraphs a Year 7 should master, and how long those paragraphs should be. And all this is taught within our online tool. We take this approach with every writing skill: all triangulated to the world’s leading curriculum systems. You can be sure your students are taught the writing skills they need to succeed.
Implementing in Your School: A Step-by-Step Process
We support your school with guided implementation. We listen to your needs and build a plan of work with your leadership team that reflects your individual school requirements. Data informs decision making. Do our diagnostic test of your student writing capabilities. Then we’ll help you set goals and targets, and teach you how to effectively interpret your writing data. Monitor value add and report to the board.
We’ll switch on Writer’s Toolbox online for your school—that’ll be transformational—and train your staff how to use it. Then, we begin a planned programme of professional development—typically over a 3-year period—to strategically lift your staff’s ability to teach writing. Our aim? Effective knowledge transfer and a lift in educational outcomes. The schools already on the journey with Writer’s Toolbox witness this daily.
You Choose Your PD Package
Alongside your teachers and students using Writer’s Toolbox online, we journey with you to build your staff capability to teach writing. Schools choose from a range of PD packages: from our Bespoke packages through to our Premium packages: we have a range to suit different budgets and different school needs. From practical hands-on workshops to teach your staff explicit writing skills, through to our comprehensive writing diagnostic testing, to classroom and teacher coaching, to our leadership support and classroom resources. You choose the PD package that suits your aims.
Want to support staff teaching a particular year level? Or transform an entire whole school’s results across a 3-year period. We have the solution for you. Each PD package carefully fashioned to build your teacher skill and their confidence—and most importantly—to take your people with you.
Teacher Workshops to Build Staff Capability
Professional Development teacher workshops with your staff are where the excitement happens. Our favourite moment in Writer’s Toolbox workshops—not including snack breaks— is seeing teachers light up when they understand how Writer’s Toolbox will not only help them teach writing, but also increase their own writing capabilities.
Writer’s Toolbox professional development workshops typically last 2.5 hours. In each workshop—packed with practical learning and activities—your staff become trained in the Writer’s Toolbox approach. From sentence teaching to paragraph instruction, improved assessment writing to running effective school writing programmes: we cover it all. And with greater skill and knowledge, your whole team will be confident teachers of writing no matter the subject or year level.
“One of the best moments is when you take the teachers away for the training or you expose them back at school with the actual program and the way of implementing it, and they get that ‘Aha!’ moment.”
Anthony Swan, Principal, Eumundi State School
You're in Safe Hands
Writer’s Toolbox professional writing coaches are out working with schools like yours every day of the week. All the writing coaches at Writer's Toolbox are experienced teachers, hand-picked for their ability to teach writing and their professional expertise. All are thoroughly trained in the Writer's Toolbox writing system and work daily across a range of school environments.
Whether your teachers are new recruits—reluctant writers themselves—or old hands; brilliant biologists or poet laureates, our coaching team are experts in coming alongside your staff in their respective subject areas and helping them solve the problems of student writing success. It’s all in a day’s work at Writer's Toolbox.
Leadership Support
Leadership support and data are critical pillars of the Writer’s Toolbox approach. On all our programmes of work, we walk the journey with you. We come alongside your leadership team or literacy leads, and support you with advice and guidance to make your writing intervention successful. We show you how to track your writing data, and support you with effective strategies for successful implementation—even down to what goes in your school newsletter or how to host a parent night. It’s the little details that matter.
Whether you are a single school or a community of schools, we have a programme of work that will help lift your writing outcomes. And the experience to make it happen. You know your school best; we know writing. Together, it’s a powerful combination.
Classroom Resources
Inspiring creativity, our range of bespoke resources bring the world of Writer’s Toolbox directly into your classroom. Engaging, individualised, fun, and jargon-free, our cross-curriculum, physical resources are designed to facilitate traditional classroom learning.From the show-stopping Sentence Train, to paragraph scaffolds, classroom posters, and sentence-construction card games, our resources help students master writing without them even knowing it. Find proven writing strategies and techniques in Dr Ian Hunter’s books, and let creativity run wild in our journals, moleskine Writer’s Companion, and more.
