English - Spelling & Handwriting
Spelling
At Lime Tree School, we follow the CUSP Spelling Curriculum.
CUSP Spelling has been purposefully built around the principles of evidence-led practice. This is to ensure that pupils acquire deep knowledge about the English spelling system and that this learning endures. The curriculum is written cumulatively to allow teachers to move backwards and forwards depending on the starting points for their pupils. Fully resourced, CUSP Spelling is both teacher facing and pupil facing, building consistency in how Spelling is taught across the school and ensuring that all teachers have the deep subject knowledge required to teach the statutory content of the National Curriculum for Spelling. CUSP Spelling is a balanced approach, drawing together knowledge about phonics and vocabulary and pairing this with pattern seeking and reasoning.
How is CUSP Spelling organised?
The CUSP Spelling curriculum is organised into 2-week blocks, with each block covering a particular set of key concepts, including spelling patterns, etymology and morphology and reasoning about spelling. These blocks are made up of three lessons per week: 2 x 15 minute (minimum) discrete Spelling lessons and 1 x Spelling starter for the final Writing lesson of each week. Systematic revisiting and incremental progression is inherently written into the long term sequence, both within and across year groups. Years 2-6 have 16 x 2-week blocks, leaving a small number of weeks for flexible content. This could include revisiting, assessment or enrichment. Year 1 has 6 blocks, which can be delivered during the Summer term to begin to build on pupils’ strong grasp of phonics at this point.
What does a block of CUSP Spelling look like?
The sequence of a block follows a routine pattern to ensure that both teachers and pupils can become familiar with the rhythm of a unit. This includes direct instruction of key concepts, revisiting of prior knowledge, explicit teaching of reasoning and spelling transfer (the application of spelling knowledge into writing) and a deliberate focus on etymology and morphology.
What will pupils know and be able to do at key points of the curriculum?
Each block includes the study of key spelling concepts. We call them concepts and not rules because there are simply too many exceptions to any pattern for it to be a rule. The curriculum is not built around the rote memorisation of spelling ‘rules’; instead, the focus is building on what pupils have learnt about the alphabetic code through Phonics lessons and teaching them to seek patterns and reason about how to spell new or unfamiliar words.
The spelling concepts included in CUSP Spelling are much further reaching than the National Curriculum programme of study for Spelling. This is known as Curriculum Plus and can be seen across all subjects in the CUSP curriculum. The statutory concepts are included in the long-term sequence but these are paired with the study of etymology and morphology, a focus on common misconceptions, learning about self-correction and reasoning about spelling attempts. This ensures that pupils become competent spellers and that they develop the independence to identify and correct errors in their independent writing.
The long-term sequence outlines the fundamental substantive knowledge that is the focus of each block. This is paired with the disciplinary knowledge that features in every block; reasoning, spelling transfer and error correction. Each concept is taught, revisited and consolidated throughout the curriculum so that pupils master this learning and commit it to the long-term memory. The evidence-led principles of sequencing the knowledge in CUSP Spelling mirror those that underpin the wider CUSP offer.
A note about Year 1:
All pupils throughout KS1 receive high-quality Phonics instruction.This ensures that pupils have a deep understanding of soundspelling correspondences beyond the most common graphemes and phonemes. The vast majority of pupils should develop strong foundations in their understanding of the alphabetic code before the end of Year 1. At this point, we begin to include explicit teaching of pattern seeking and reasoning of key statutory spelling concepts that pupils often struggle with including word endings (such as -ed, -s, -es and -ing) and National Curriculum common exception words. CUSP Spelling includes 6 x 2 week blocks of study that can be used at the end of Year 1, where pupils have secured the required understanding of Phonics. However, each of these concepts is subsequently revisited later in the curriculum and teachers may choose to use this content in some of the flexible content blocks in Year 2, if pupils need more time to secure strong foundations in the alphabetic code in Year 1.
Assessment of pupils:
Assessment is an essential component of CUSP Spelling. However, we recognise that testing pupils on lists of words in isolation only tells us one part of the story. For us to truly understand whether pupils have mastered the spelling concepts that we have taught them, we need to look at their application of this knowledge alongside their wider spelling toolkit at both word level and sentence level. This is what we call spelling transfer – the ability to transfer knowledge about spelling directly into writing.
Every year group has three diagnostic spelling assessments. These should be completed towards the end of each term to inform the following term of spelling instruction. This ensures that where pupils have not mastered concepts that they have already covered, there is the opportunity to go back and reteach this knowledge so that pupils do not carry gaps in understanding as they move through the curriculum. Teachers could choose to use the flexible content weeks for this purpose, if necessary.
Each assessment is made up of word level testing and a dictation task. The words included in each assessment represent words that have been taught in the current term, the previous term and, for KS2 only, the coming term. This means that concepts are included on multiple occasions due to the revisiting units. The dictation tasks focus only on words that have been taught in the current term.
Handwriting
At our school, we integrate spelling and handwriting. In Key Stage 1, Year 1 and Year 2 children use specialised A5 books featuring handwriting lines to master relative letter sizing alongside their phonics work. This consistency ensures that visual memory clues are maintained for a smooth transition between year groups. Staff continuously review spelling and handwriting outcomes during live sessions to address letter formation errors immediately.
For practical application, extended spelling work occurs directly inside the pupils' main writing books to embed accurate handwriting into regular composition. These routines align fully with our broader school policies to ensure a predictable, high-impact learning environment across all classes.
