New findings suggest that teaching children grammar is of little use in improving their writing skills.

The study undertaken by researchers at the University of York found that teaching children old-fashioned grammar was not as helpful as teaching them skills such as how to combine short sentences into longer ones.

The funding for the research has come from the Department for Education and Skills, which undertakes regular reviews of the evidence to establish what are the best educational practices. The University of York English review team looked at the results of over 100 years of studies on formal grammar teaching, including previous government-backed reviews.

Despite consistent findings that teaching grammar does not improve the quality or fluency of children's writing, it is still enshrined in much educational policy. In the national literacy strategy, five to seven year olds should learn about nouns, verbs and pronouns, and older children are expected to master the grammar of complex sentences.

Professor Richard Andrews told EducationGuardian.co.uk: "There is a residual hanging-on to the teaching of formal grammar. They aren't able to let it go."

Prof Andrews said: "In a pressured curriculum, where the development of literacy is a high priority, there will be better ways of teaching writing." In a review at the end of the first year of the national literacy strategy, Ofsted concluded that improvements had been poorest in sentence construction, punctuation and paragraphing.

Teaching techniques such as sentence combining and emphasising the connection between reading and writing may achieve better results. The research indicates that the National Curriculum teaching materials and approaches should be reconsidered, believes the team at the University of York. "We should now move on from a belief that formal grammar teaching helps, because it doesn't," said Prof Andrews.