A Well-Intentioned Practice Under Scrutiny
Walk into almost any KS2 classroom on a writing day and you are likely to encounter a familiar ritual. Before a single word has been composed, a polished piece of writing appears on the board — annotated, colour-coded, and held up as the destination every pupil should be travelling towards. The intention is generous: show children what success looks like, reduce anxiety, and provide a scaffold for those who struggle to begin. The acronym WAGOLL — What A Good One Looks Like — has become so embedded in primary practice that questioning it can feel almost contrarian.
And yet there is a compelling case for doing exactly that.
This is not an argument against quality. Nor is it a dismissal of the genuine value that well-chosen mentor texts can offer. Rather, it is an invitation to examine what happens in the minds of young writers when an exemplar arrives before the imaginative work has begun — and to consider whether our sequencing of the writing process may sometimes be working against the outcomes we most desire.
The Psychology of the Blank Page
When a child sits down to write without having seen a finished model, something cognitively significant occurs. The mind is required to generate: to search its own store of language, experience, and aesthetic instinct for possibilities. This generative phase is uncomfortable, often messy, and frequently productive in ways that cannot be predicted in advance. It is the space in which genuine authorial decision-making takes place.
Introduce a polished exemplar at this moment and the cognitive dynamic shifts. Research in educational psychology suggests that when learners are presented with a strong example before attempting a task, they are highly likely to reproduce its surface features — its sentence openings, its structural choices, even its specific vocabulary — rather than drawing on their own creative resources. The exemplar does not inspire so much as it colonises.
This is not a failure of character or imagination on the part of pupils. It is a entirely predictable response to a demanding situation. When the brain perceives that a correct answer already exists, the path of least resistance is replication. For writing, where there is no single correct answer, this instinct can be quietly devastating.
What Homogenised Writing Reveals
Experienced KS2 teachers will recognise the phenomenon even if they have not previously attributed it to WAGOLL. It manifests as a set of thirty stories that all begin with the same type of time adverbial, that all deploy the same sentence structure at the moment of dramatic tension, that all reach for the same category of ambitious vocabulary. The writing is technically competent. It may well meet the success criteria. But it lacks the quality that distinguishes a piece of writing from a piece of writing — the sense that a particular human consciousness has shaped this particular arrangement of words.
When we mark such work, we often feel a vague dissatisfaction that is difficult to name. The pupils have done what was asked of them. The problem is that what was asked of them, however unwittingly, was to reproduce rather than to create.
Reordering the Process: Discovery Before Destination
A more productive sequence places the exemplar not at the beginning of the writing journey but in the middle of it — after pupils have committed their own ideas to the page, but before they have reached a final draft.
Consider the following approach. Pupils begin with a stimulus: an image, an object, a piece of music, a spoken anecdote, a carefully chosen question. They write freely and without reference to any model. This initial draft is explicitly framed as exploratory — a space for thinking through writing rather than writing towards a predetermined standard. Teachers circulate, noting the authentic choices pupils are making: the unexpected metaphor, the unusual structural decision, the moment of genuine voice.
Only once this generative work is complete does the exemplar enter the room. Crucially, it arrives not as a target to be matched but as a fellow writer's response to a similar challenge. The question posed is not 'How does this piece show you what yours should look like?' but rather 'What choices has this writer made, and how do they compare with the choices you made?' This positions both texts — the exemplar and the pupil's draft — as equally legitimate objects of analytical attention.
Alternative Approaches Worth Considering
Several practical strategies can help teachers move away from the exemplar-first model without abandoning the support that struggling writers genuinely need.
Annotated process writing offers one powerful alternative. Rather than presenting a finished piece, teachers share a piece of writing in progress — a draft with visible crossings-out, marginal questions, and reconsidered choices. This reveals writing as a process of decision-making rather than a performance of correctness, and gives pupils permission to engage with their own drafts in the same exploratory spirit.
Sentence-level study decoupled from whole-text models allows teachers to build technical repertoire without presenting a complete blueprint. Pupils might study how a particular author handles the shift between action and interiority, or how a sentence can be restructured to alter its emphasis, without ever seeing the full text from which those examples are drawn. The technique is taught; the application remains the pupil's own.
Peer exemplars from previous cohorts carry different psychological weight from published or teacher-produced models. When pupils see that a child of their own age produced something of genuine quality, the message is not 'here is what good writing looks like' but 'here is what someone like you was capable of.' This distinction matters enormously for self-efficacy.
Holding Quality and Originality Together
None of this suggests that standards should be lowered or that pupils should be left without guidance. The goal is not to abandon quality but to relocate the conversation about quality to a point in the writing process where it can genuinely inform revision rather than pre-empt imagination.
The most effective writing teachers are those who can hold two things simultaneously: a clear understanding of what constitutes accomplished writing, and a genuine curiosity about what this particular child, writing today, might produce if given the space to find out. WAGOLL, at its worst, resolves that productive tension too early and in one direction only.
At its best, the exemplar text is a conversation partner — one that arrives at the right moment, asks good questions, and then steps aside to let the writer do their work.
