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TheSchoolRun.com closure date

As we informed you a few months ago, TheSchoolRun has had to make the difficult decision to close due to financial pressures and the company has now ceased trading. We had hoped to keep our content available through a partnership with another educational provider, but this provider has since withdrawn from the agreement.

As a result, we now have to permanently close TheSchoolRun.com. However, to give subscribers time to download any content they’d like to keep, we will keep the website open until 31st July 2025. After this date, the site will be taken down and there will be no further access to any resources. We strongly encourage you to download and save any resources you think you may want to use in the future.

In particular, we suggest downloading:

You should already have received 16 primary school eBooks (worth £108.84) to download and keep. If you haven’t received these, please contact us at [email protected] before 31st July 2025, and we will send them to you.

We are very sorry that there is no way to continue offering access to resources and sincerely apologise for the inconvenience caused.

What is a pronoun?

What is a pronoun?
We explain what a pronoun is and how primary-school children are taught to use pronouns to avoid repetition in their written work.

What is a pronoun?

A pronoun is a word used to replace a noun.

Examples of pronouns are: he, she, it, they. We use pronouns so that we don't need to keep repeating the same nouns; for example, rather than repeat the noun 'the car' in this sentence, we use a pronoun (in bold):

We took the car to the garage because the car needed fixing.
We took the car to the garage because it needed fixing.

Personal pronouns explained

A personal pronoun is a word which can be used instead of a person, place or thing.

There are twelve personal pronouns for people: I, you, he, she, it, we, they, me, him, her, us and them.

There are three personal pronouns for things: they, them, it.

Personal pronouns allow you to avoid repeating a word and to refer to someone already mentioned. If the noun is plural, so is the pronoun which replaces it.

Possessive pronouns explained

Possessive pronouns are used to show ownership of a person or thing. Some can be used on their own (mine, yours, his, hers, ours, theirs, whose); others must be used with a noun (my, your, his, her, its, our, their, whose).

Possessive pronouns are used to avoid repetition of the noun. For example:

John put John's bag on John's peg. He walked to John's classroom.

If you use pronouns the sentence reads:

John put his bag on his peg. He walked to his classroom.

Pronouns in primary school

In Key Stage 1, children are encouraged to make sure that they don't keep repeating nouns and use pronouns instead. Teachers encourage this progression by showing them how to do this in shared writing and through marking the children's writing. Reading various fiction and non-fiction texts will also give children a feel for using pronouns.

Children's ability to identify pronouns correctly is tested at the end of primary school as part of the KS2 SATs Punctuation, grammar and spelling test.