We were very pleased to award Pixmore School (Stevenage) a Primary Award to support their fabulous, multi-school creative writing project. The award will buy over a hundred books and give a contribution towards trophies and venue hire for their celebration evening. As Sarah Inman (Deputy Head) writes:
The writing project began as a partnership last year between 5 junior schools and the impact it had on the pupils, families and staff involved was enormous. The project was based around a book and staff created 3 weeks of engaging, creative lessons which resulted in the children producing some amazing writing, displays and models.
As part of the project, we held a competition between the schools where children could showcase their work and were nominated for best writer in their year group (the Chairs of Governors selected the winners). They were then recognised at an awards evening, complete with trophies, which aimed to celebrate the children’s endeavour, progress and skills in writing.
We were very impressed with the scale of this project – this year it has been expanded to include 9-10 schools – and the resulting huge number of pupils who will benefit. A real strength of the bid was the reported success of the previous years in progress made by the children, moderation and collaboration benefits for staff as well as the motivation and excitement generated for everyone involved.
Let’s give Sarah the last word:
In the first year of running the project for my own school, we saw 45%+ of each cohort making progress in the 3 weeks of the project alone. For many that showed accelerated progress by the end of the spring term as they were able to continue to put their enthusiasm and enjoyment for writing and vocabulary into other units beyond the initial project.