LESLEY FINLAY shares the memories of a successful school project that involved a collaboration bringing students together with one of the country’s top publishers…
Over the last few months I have been working with a group of young people from an academy in Margate, a town like many others with its pockets of poverty and huge richness. We have been working on a Reading Activists programme, run by the Reading Agency, a project you may recall featured in these pages last year.
The pilot project, which lasted three years, made a huge difference to young people nationally; by bringing diverse groups into the libraries, skilled practitioners from librarians to teachers and to writers and artists, have drawn out their creative and leadership skills. It’s a perfect example of a distraction technique: take students out of the comfort zone, the familiar classroom with the same old faces (sorry, teachers!) and you see different people emerge.
The majority of young people are confident, able and keen to learn; if only schools were set up in the optimum way there wouldn’t be the issues of attainment and application. In this particular project, I have worked alongside Sarah Bottle, a hugely gifted librarian (her job title is far more complicated involving the words ‘community’ and ‘engagement’) whose vision and drive won funding, a group of young people and Steve, a school librarian with a sideline in stand-up and interesting moustaches.
It was Steve’s great work in organising a whole school Literacy Festival that caught the eye of the Reading Agency who fixed it for the school to work with Hachette on a marketing and research project around Mind Games, the new book by teen author Teri Terry. One of our ‘outcomes’ – a published review by one of the students – is printed in our book review section on page 22 in this issue of Ink Pellet.
The good people of Hachette made the long journey down from their glitzy offices in London to the dark and arty Round House Theatre in Dover. The young people planned an interview with Teri: coming up with the questions, format, filming and photographing – the lot. She was comfortingly ‘ordinary’, putting them at ease.
For many lucky students in plusher parts of the country, this is no big deal. But in a short day of five hours, allowing these young people to make their own decisions, some of them had already grown in stature.
Our project continued to Margate; we invaded the town library on a busy Friday afternoon; but the adult readers, rather than tutting, smiled benignly as the young people learned vital presentation skills – standing up straight, chin up, eyes ahead and big voices. Their impromptu audience seemed to will them to success.
Creating tweets and blurbs, the young people learned that writing does not have to involve great long tracts of words. They were chuffed with their 140-character creations; and put on fantastic, dramatic voices as they recited their blurbs.
The ‘highlight’ was a visit to the Hachette offices, where the team had worked hard to give the students a real treat. This world of giant glass ‘elevators’ as the youngsters insisted on calling the lift, is a far cry from the seagulls and sand around them at home. They met Robert Muchamore and their old friend Teri, getting a unique view of how a book is made.
I shall miss those young people and often wonder where they are, and how they are doing. The abiding memory for me is the session I ran in the school library. This was a down to work session where everyone had a task to do: a review of the book; a résumé of the day in London; design and photograph editing – real skills. But as I walked the length of the room, I spotted three teen boys sitting on a sofa, heads down and concentrating on the laptops in their eye line. A student took the photograph, above. Priceless!
All this work culminated in a newspaper, created from their own words and photos. Take a look if you can at www.newsforschools.co.uk. It’s a great piece of work that the young people should treasure.
And just as that project ends, I must say farewell to editing dear old Ink Pellet. I hope to continue to contribute but I leave you in the more than capable hands of your new editor, Dawn.
IMAGE: Three boys hard at work – if only all ‘lessons’ were like this.