The Story Bias: How an Overemphasis on Narrative Is Leaving KS2 Pupils Unprepared for Non-Fiction Writing

A Curriculum Built Around Story

Story is, without question, a powerful vehicle for literacy development. It builds empathy, develops syntactic fluency, and gives pupils a framework for organising experience into meaning. The centrality of narrative in primary English has a long and defensible history.

But a curriculum that privileges story to the extent that many KS2 classrooms do — where narrative writing occupies the majority of extended writing time, where the class novel anchors most units of work, and where non-fiction is visited briefly and then set aside — is not serving pupils as fully as it might. And the consequences of that imbalance are becoming increasingly visible as pupils move into secondary education.

This is the story bias: the tendency, embedded in planning, resourcing, and professional culture, to treat narrative as the natural and primary mode of written expression, and to regard non-fiction as a supplementary concern.

What Secondary Schools Are Seeing

Speak to English teachers in Year 7 and a consistent picture emerges. Incoming pupils can, in the main, write a story. Many can write one with considerable flair. But ask them to construct a reasoned argument, to write an explanation that builds logically from premise to conclusion, or to produce a formal report that synthesises information from multiple sources — and the confidence drains away rapidly.

This is not merely an anecdotal observation. Research into writing development consistently identifies expository writing — the broad category encompassing argument, explanation, analysis, and report — as the form most strongly associated with academic success across all subjects. It is also the form that primary education most frequently underteaches.

The transition from KS2 to KS3 is, among other things, a transition from narrative-dominant literacy to expository-dominant literacy. Pupils who arrive at secondary school having spent the majority of their writing time on stories are, in a very real sense, underprepared.

The Hidden Complexity of Non-Fiction

One reason non-fiction is underserved in KS2 is that it is frequently underestimated. There is a persistent, if rarely articulated, assumption that non-fiction writing is somehow simpler than fiction — that once a pupil can write a coherent story, the skills will transfer naturally to writing a balanced argument or a detailed explanation.

They do not. The craft demands of non-fiction are distinct, specific, and genuinely complex:

• Argument writing requires a pupil to hold a position, anticipate counter-positions, marshal evidence, and deploy logical connectives with precision. It demands a kind of intellectual discipline that narrative does not.
• Explanation writing requires the writer to sequence information in a way that builds understanding for a reader who may know nothing about the subject — a fundamentally different cognitive challenge from sequencing events in a plot.
• Report writing demands objectivity, economy, and structural clarity. The temptation to embellish — a strength in narrative — becomes a weakness here.

Each of these forms has its own conventions, its own grammatical repertoire, its own relationship between writer and reader. None of them can be taught adequately in a single two-week unit wedged between two narrative projects.

Why the Imbalance Persists

Several factors sustain the story bias in KS2 classrooms.

First, narrative is more immediately engaging for many pupils. Children who resist writing often respond more readily to story prompts than to argument tasks. The emotional investment that narrative invites can feel like a more accessible route into extended writing.

Second, teacher subject knowledge in non-fiction craft is often thinner. Many primary teachers received limited explicit training in the features and teaching of expository forms. It is natural to teach with greater confidence and enthusiasm in areas of greater personal expertise.

Third, published resources and schemes of work frequently replicate the imbalance. When planning frameworks allocate six weeks to narrative and two weeks to non-fiction across a half-year, the curriculum itself encodes the hierarchy.

Finally, the class novel — a powerful and legitimate teaching tool — tends to anchor units in narrative territory. When the core text is fiction, the gravitational pull towards narrative writing is strong, even when teachers consciously attempt to draw out non-fiction opportunities.

Reframing the Non-Fiction Curriculum

Addressing the story bias does not require abandoning narrative. It requires treating non-fiction forms with the same intentionality, the same explicit teaching of craft, and the same sustained practice that story currently receives.

Teach Non-Fiction as Craft, Not as Formula

The standard approach to teaching, for example, a persuasive letter involves introducing the features (greeting, paragraphs, rhetorical questions, sign-off) and then asking pupils to write one. This is genre instruction, not craft instruction.

Craft instruction would involve reading genuinely persuasive letters and asking: How does this writer make you feel the force of their argument? What does this rhetorical question actually do to the reader? Why does the writer concede this point before making their main case? It would involve examining the rhythm of a well-constructed argument, the way evidence is introduced, the precision of the vocabulary chosen to carry a specific tone.

Non-fiction has texture, artistry, and intentionality. Teaching it as a set of features to be included reduces it to a checklist exercise.

Provide Sustained, Repeated Practice

A single non-fiction unit per term is insufficient for the kind of procedural fluency that genuine expository writing requires. Brief, regular non-fiction writing tasks — a short explanation paragraph, a constructed argument response, a summary of a text read in science or geography — embed the habits of expository thinking across the school week rather than concentrating them in occasional dedicated units.

Cross-curricular writing is an underused resource here. Every subject offers legitimate, meaningful contexts for non-fiction writing. A written explanation of how the water cycle works in geography is not a literacy lesson colonising science time; it is a pupil using writing as a tool for thinking — which is precisely what secondary education will demand of them.

Read Non-Fiction as Readers and Writers

Just as the class novel models narrative craft, non-fiction mentor texts should model expository craft. This means reading editorials, explanatory essays, quality journalism, and well-constructed arguments — not merely as sources of information, but as demonstrations of how skilled writers organise and express ideas in non-narrative forms.

Building a classroom library that includes high-quality non-fiction alongside fiction is a simple but meaningful signal: both forms matter, both are worth reading carefully, and both have something to teach a developing writer.

Towards a More Balanced KS2 Writing Curriculum

The goal is not to diminish story. It is to ensure that by the time a KS2 pupil leaves Year 6, they can write with confidence, clarity, and craft across the full range of forms that their academic and civic lives will require of them.

A pupil who can only write a story is a pupil whose literacy has been only partially developed. The KS2 English curriculum — in its planning, its resourcing, and its daily classroom practice — has the capacity and the responsibility to do more.