Are kids taught spelling and handwriting in the UK?

Wow, that headteacher sounds like a safeguarding case waiting to be opened by 2026 standards! (I started infant school at the tail end of corporal punishment being legal and only remember one teacher spanking one pupil one time, and that teacher was very close to retirement. She was pretty terrifying, tbf) Re: my daughter returning to year 3 as the only child without a pen licence, thankfully she went to a school where the Infants and Juniors are on two different sites and no one at the juniors really noticed nor cared about her lack of pen licence (thankfully, as she’d been really anxious about being behind her peers by various metrics in the lead up to the start of the new term and the general worries had all crystallised around the pen licence thing). As it happened, she went on to also miss the majority of year 3 & 4 due to being on the governments ‘Extremely Clinically Vulnerable’ list through the covid pandemic. This gave her plenty of opportunity to catch up on the handwriting exercises (she now has better handwriting than any of her family members) because those were relatively easy to do via resources supplied to home. It does seem weird to put time into cursive now that almost everyone types into devices. Perhaps it would be more efficient to teach children neat and legible print handwriting (still useful for filling in paper forms, writing addresses on packages, making labels etc) and encourage those with an aptitude to pursue cursive? Would be more mindful of children with SENs of the dyspraxia/dyslexixa type? That said, there may well be some advantages to handwriting lessons re: expanding neurodevelopmental pathways during childhood that has little to do with the actual handwriting at the end of it (similar to learning an instrument, obvs no one is putting their infant school Recorder prowess on a CV but the gains in things like proprioception skills and teamwork might’ve been a valuable foundation in the skills they now have in adulthood).