There are many rites of passage in a young person’s life. The ability to drive, to drink, to ride a rollercoaster. Yet one milestone comes with a particular mixture of anxiety and pride: the pen licence.
In many schools across Australia, young children are given a “credential” for their proficiency in handwriting, which looks like a driver’s licence. Where the tradition originated and how it is employed is shrouded in mystery.
The Australian curriculum specifies that primary school children work to master handwriting – and keyboard skills – that is speedy, accurate and fluent, but it does not instruct teachers to formalise the occasion with a certificate.
The decision to hand out pen licences once students reach a competent level is up to individual schools and teachers.
“I don’t know where it came from,” Sydney primary school teacher Adam Woods says. “It’s just a thing we’ve always done in year 4.”
Unlike a driving test, handwriting is generally assessed over a period of weeks rather than in one sitting – looking at factors such as pencil grip, writing on the line, leaving appropriate gaps between words, correct letter shapes and cursive competence.
Some schools hand out licences as early as year 1, but most, like Woods’s school, wait until year 4 to begin awarding the coveted title. If students pass, they ditch their pencils in favour of a pen.
Woods uses the pen licence as an incentive for students to write neatly, and because “it’s a lot of fun”.
“They just want to get that little licence in their hands,” he says. “It’s something for them to work towards, and works well for most kids.”
His school makes a mocked-up New South Wales driver’s licence, which is distributed to each student throughout year 4 when teachers deem their writing competent enough.
“There’s no structure about it,” he says. “You trickle them out, and by the end of the year they all miraculously have them.”
Woods is not searching for perfection, but rather a “balance between neatness and speed, which I would call fluency”.
“Some kids have teachers that want all the joins and slopes, and letters to be beautifully rounded,” he says.
Once attained, students “proudly display them on their desks”, and at the start of year 5 they ask if they need to bring it to class to keep using pens.
“I don’t know why we don’t let them use pen [before year 4],” Woods says. “There’s erasable pens, it makes no sense.”
Some schools in New Zealand, Canada and Ireland also use the pen licence, but it is less common in the United States.
The use of a pen licence has been criticised by some experts as well as anxious children.
Educators have argued it can divide classrooms and discriminate against children with learning difficulties, as well as encouraging an unhelpful “just try harder” approach to teaching.
Teacher Kristal Power never received a pen licence when attending school in the 1990s. “Upset I didn’t get one when I was in year 4, I held on to the idea I’d be able to earn one in year 5,” she says. “[But] either year 5 teachers assumed we all got one or that was just the year the school decided to use it as an incentive.”
Twenty years on, she is still writing in pen without a licence, while her son, who has ADHD, also didn’t receive one.
“Any practice or tradition teachers continue should be critically examined through the lens of inclusive education,” she says.
“Change the focus to legible writing, correct formation or give out licences for the other forms of communication that require a level of mastery.”
The relevance of the pen licence is likely to evolve as technology develops. A digital “cybersecurity licence” is currently being developed by Edith Cowan University, to be issued to students based upon their understanding of online safety.
Its researchers have pointed to the hours students spend learning English compared with time studying key technology skills.
With young people increasingly using digital devices rather than pen and paper for school work , the Australian curriculum has been revised to include the development of keyboarding skills and digital literacy as well as handwriting.
Yet it’s unlikely the pen licence will be entirely lost.
Evidence suggests handwriting can be closely related to academic achievement, with the physical act of writing – particularly in early years – contributing to greater recognition and memorisation of letters, words and spelling.
