Tell us a bit about the Write On – School for Young Writers?
The school has been going for over 30 years and it offers classes on Saturday mornings for very young students, right up to school leavers.
It has writers who are the teachers, and that makes a huge difference, because those doing the teaching are intimate with the profession and the tricks of the trade.
Write On also sends writing tutors into schools, employed by Write On as tutors to facilitate classes. For example, I am employed by Write On to teach at my local primary school, and I’ve had feedback from the schools that we have improved the performance of writing across the whole school.
The classes at Write On bring young people with similar interests together and so helps produce fantastic, engaged young writers, people like Sarah-Kate Simons and Elizabeth Ayrey who have been interviewed for your Monthly magazine.
That sounds like a useful approach to teaching young writers and very similar to the approach used by Community Arts Partnership?
In addition to going into different schools around our area, Write On also run Masterclasses and holiday programmes. During the summer and winter school holidays there is a week where Junior and High School students come along and write, being taught by really good specialist writers – poets, song-writers, fantasy writers and short and long-form practitioners. It’s one of the most fun weeks of the year!
