This study investigated the engagement with writing of reluctant writers in the contexts of home and school. A structured and semi-structured survey method was used to capture responses from 106 reluctant writers in 9 primary schools (age range 6--9 year olds) in the UK. Findings show that although these students were deemed to be reluctant writers by their teachers, the majority admitted to writing in a range of genres in the home context. It was found that these students had access to adult help with their writing in the home and also had ready-made audiences. A sociocultural perspective is used to explain the discontinuity in the writing behaviours of these students between home and school. The implications of this study are applicable to societies with highly prescriptive writing curricula in which transcriptional writing skills are privileged over creativity and compositional processes. The corollary is that schools need to adopt ethnographic approaches to literacy in order to capture the varied identities of students as writers, and provide the means by which students can freely apply literacy practices developed in the home to writing in school. (Contains 4 figures.)