poetryclass - poetry active school profiles

We began by working with Sarah Maguire as part of the WH Smith Poets in Schools Scheme. The next year we took thirty Year 10s on a residential poetry weekend. This incorporated work on the skills needed to tackle unseen poems in exams, but the high spots of the weekend were the creative sessions, a reading and workshops led by Matthew Sweeney, writing activities run by the department and the final reading by students.

The element of young people working closely with writers, being able to spend time sharing work and discussing the writing process has made a real difference to many of the students who have participated in these events. This was especially so for the kids who attended our first Arvon Foundation week at Lumb Bank. We worked with Sarah Maguire partnered by Lemn Sissay. They made a great team and the kids rose to the occasion and wrote some special poems. This week changed lives. One student went on to be a prize winner in the National Young Poetry Prize, two years running; a student with literacy needs gained the confidence to be able to recognise her ability in English and will now get at least a C grade in this years GCSEs; and boys who laughed at poetry before they went confidently read poems they had written in their year assembly.

We've now made three visits to Lumb Bank and each year the engagement kids make with poetry is stunning. The commitment of the writers who work with us is always enormous; Stephen Knight and Ann Sansom in 1999, Patience Agbabi and Don Paterson this year.

But Arvon weeks are only for 16 students so we've extended the work within the school. Last year Jane Duran ran workshops with Year 7, 8 and 9 students; this year, as part of a joint project, with our primary feeder schools Valerie Bloom and Eva Salzman have run after school sessions, and in the summer term we are taking thirty Year 8's on a poetry weekend in Essex. We publish poems in Morpeth Weekly News, send poems to the TES and have held readings for parents.

We've had financial support from Bankers Trust, the Wates Foundation, Pearson TV and Susan Hill, as well as the Poetry Society, but you don't need funding to send poems to the TES, or to display them in the corridor, or publish them within school. We started small and aimed for one project a year at first, funding for our first trip to Lumb Bank came because of the success of the W H Smith placement . So try it, write a good proposal and you're likely to get funding and once that project goes well you'll want to do more.

-- Jane Anderson, Morpeth School

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If you would like your school's 'Poetry Profile' to be posted, please e-mail a description to us (and URL link if applicable): education@poetrysociety.org.uk

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School Poetry Profile: MORPETH Morpeth is an inner city multicultural school in Bethnal Green, East London; the majority of its students come from very poor backgrounds. The school aims to give students experiences which create aspirations and extend their cultural experiences. The English department's contribution to this programme has been a series of poetry events over the last six years.

School Poetry Profile: MORPETH