Dominic Wyse, the study’s lead author and professor of early childhood and primary development at UCL, said: “The lack of impact of grammar teaching on pupils’ narrative writing raises questions about the extensive grammar specifications that are part of England’s national curriculum.

“Currently, the content of England’s national curriculum requires children aged six to seven to be taught grammatical terms such as noun phrase, statement, command and tense.

“Older primary school children have to learn terms such as subordinate clause, adverbial, modal verb, active and passive.”

The study also looked at a more interactive approach to the study of grammar via an online platform called “Englicious” and while there were some “encouraging” results, they again found there was no statistical improvement in children’s writing ability.

The children’s writing was tested via a narrative writing test and a sentence generation task.

Speaking to The Telegraph, Professor Wyse said he believed encouraging young children to simply sit down and write for longer periods could be more beneficial than teaching them “what a noun is”.

He said: “My personal view is why do you need to be teaching young children what a noun is? Why do they need to know what the definition of a noun is? I just don’t think that is the most important thing to be doing at that age.

“There are evidence-based approaches to teaching writing that have already been proven.

“A really simple one is to just practise writing more, and by that I mean having opportunities to genuinely sit and write for extended periods.

“Schooling can often be lots of exercises and children rarely get to plan and write at length.

“They do of course get the opportunity to do that, in history lessons for example. But it would be ironic if, in their English lessons, they are not given the chance to write.”

‘Good vocabulary, good imagination’

In the 1960s, the focus on grammar was largely dropped from the curriculum and the priority was placed on “English Literature” – the idea being children would pick up the grammar as they went along.

In 2014, the current curriculum was introduced by Michael Gove, then secretary of state for education, and a stronger emphasis was once again placed on the learning of grammar.

Debra Myhill, Creative Writing director at the University of Exeter, said that in her view, the question of whether learning grammar at a young age was beneficial to writing was far more complex than the study seemed to suggest.

She added: “Being a good writer does mean you need to spell accurately and have grammatical sentences but it also means you need good vocabulary, good imagination and you need to understand narrative structure.

“No one single intervention can tackle all of those things at once.”

In the UCL study’s conclusion, the authors wrote: “Knowledge about language is not entirely synonymous with grammar as currently conceived in England’s national curriculum.

“National curriculum policy makers made selections of curriculum content to be covered based on prioritisation of certain kinds of knowledge at the expense of other kinds of knowledge.”

The UCL study concluded that the curriculum should focus more on what helps children to develop their writing skills at different points in development, focusing on teaching approaches such as sentence-combining, planning and emphasising the processes of writing.

Professor Wyse said that the national curriculum should reflect the evidence on the value of teaching grammar in classrooms. He added: “Until an in-depth review of England’s national curriculum is undertaken children are unlikely to be receiving the optimal evidence-based teaching of writing that they deserve.”

‘Writing for enjoyment’

Adrian Williams, a trustee for the Queen’s English Society, said that while learning grammar might not make children “better writers” it would ensure they wrote “correctly”.

He said: “Let’s consider what we mean by ‘better’.

“If we mean ‘more imaginatively, more powerfully, making a greater impact with what they write’, it seems unlikely that the learning of grammar will improve a child’s ability to write better.

“Indeed the learning experience might well deter the child from writing for enjoyment at all.

“If, by contrast, ‘better’ means ‘correctly’, it seems reasonable to expect that children who have been taught grammar and have learned the lesson will eventually begin to apply what they have been taught.

“Then they will have the advantage that the people who read what they write will give their writing more respect.

“Or, putting the case the other way round, people who write incorrectly will run the risk that their writing earns the scorn of their readers: potential employers, for example.”