Enrichment

English lessons shouldn't just be about examination preparation and I am delighted to say that I still do enrichment lessons with students I worked with for the 11 plus exams. This April (2025), I am doing Anglo-Saxon poetry with a Year 10 student at North London Collegiate (we have just finished 'The World's Wife' by Carol Ann Duffy); 'The Knight's Tale'; by Chaucer (in the original) with a Year 6 student about to go to St Paul's; 'Much Ado About Nothing' with another Year 6 student about to go to SPGS; Shakespeare's sonnets with a Year 6 student about to go to Godolphin; 'An Inspector Calls' by Priestley with 2 different students in Year 8 both at SPGS. All of these students worked with me during their 11+ preparation and it is so exciting being able to do the fun stuff with them now. I absolutely love the fact that I am sharing Middle English poetry with a 10 year old student and that she is getting such pleasure from finding that she can understand most of it.

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Creative Writing

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Encouraging young people to write creatively is central to my teaching ethos. You can't fully understand a writer's choices, until you think about your own (and vice versa). I weave creative writing into all my lessons whether 11+ prep, A level, or general enrichment, and I insist that all my students enter competitions to motivate them into writing. Students I have worked with have won or been commended for the following competitions: the Tower Poetry Prize, the H. G. Wells Short Story Competition, Author of Tomorrow, the Young Walter Scott Prize, and in 2024 alone the Foyle Young Poets, the Martha Mills Young Writer's Prize, the Daunt Books' Short Story Competition, the Elmbridge Literary Competition, the Solstice Prize and the Henrietta Branford Writing Competition. This year I volunteered to a be a judge of the BBC 500 Words competition.

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I am currently doing enrichment with a Year 6 student called Chloe. At the moment we are studying 'The Yellow Wallpaper' and doing lots of creative writing. I am delighted to say that she has been a runner-up or commended in the following competitions in 2024 alone: Daunt Books, the Elmbridge Literary Competition, Solstice National Young Nature Writing Prize; Foyle's Young Poet of the Year; and was one of only 12 runners up in the second year of the Martha Mills Young Writers' Prize 2024 - it was judged by Philip Pullman and she was the youngest by far of the winners! Chloe and her parents have kindly allowed me to share her beautiful story, 'Therapy Cat' which has been published in an anthology for the Martha Mills competition.

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At St Paul's Girls' School, I was selected by the Poetry Society to be a Teacher Trailblazer in recognition of my creative writing teaching and the fact that so many of my students won competitions. See Sophie's poem below for an example of a winning poem from the time I worked at SPGS. A number of attendees of the SPGS Creative Writing Group have gone onto become published authors. Look at Lucy Webster's ground-breaking memoir 'The View from Down Here', Isabella Hammad's beautiful novels including her most recent 'Enter Ghost' which was short-listed for the Women's Prize for Fiction, Imogen West-Knight's funny and disturbing novel, 'Deep Down', and Ankita Saxena's stunning collection of poems, 'Mother/Line'.

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