Updated 2nd July 2010
For teachers in London, please take a look at the Perform-a-poem web-pages on the London Grid for Learning site. This is where you can upload your pupils’ poetry performances in an ‘esafe’ environment. Take a look here.
These are the details of the MA in Children’s Literature and the MA in Children’s Literature and Writing at Birkbeck, University of London, that I’ve co-devised, I’ll be co-directing and co-teaching, starting in October.
I’m doing a class on children’s writing at the Edinburgh University International Summer School this year. See August 18 here.
There was a conference called ‘Education for Liberation’
These are the notes of my talk.
Here’s a recent lunchtime lecture I gave at Birkbeck, University of London (November 11, 2009) on why and how Children’s Literature is for adults too.
Taxonomy of adult responses to children’s literature:
'No children's literature is an island, entire of itself: how and why adults read, re-read and remember children's books.'
I will look at the many different ways in which adults are part of the audience for children's books whether that's in the same continuum as children or in terms of people's memory. This arcs back to how and why this literature is written: as part of the conversation going on about childhood. The customary tendency to deny, conceal or diminish these connections is ideological and serves dominant ideas about children and their subservient role. The more we can acknowledge it and change our practice accordingly, the more we can challenge those dominant ideas. Read the full lecture...
Here’s a letter to the Guardian in response to the recent Cambridge Review of Primary Education.
The Cambridge review is absolutely right about calling for the abolition of Sats (Too much too young: start school at six says key report, 16 October), and I support this summer's boycott. Sats have turned the primary curriculum into a desert of work sheets, short extracts and a fear of failure.
In the English Sats, examiners have unleashed an abuse of the empirical method by making the reading of literature into a tedious and stunting exercise in fact-spotting, even as children themselves have been reduced to percentages and scores. I have been a school parent continuously for 30 years and visited hundreds of schools. In all that time it has never been any use to me that any child, mine included, be talked of as a number or a level.
The government's education policies were devised without a public debate about how children and teachers learn. You can only do this through the four processes of observation, investigation, discovery and discussion. In fact, finding out about learning has to be at the heart of every teacher's and every school's practice. Children's work itself should be built upon the four processes, with imagination and play as part of the mix.
In the very first key stage 2 Sats paper, the candidates were asked to say what was in a matchbox in a story by Jan Mark. The only correct answer was "nothing", and yet the fun of the story is that the children "fill" the matchbox with their fantasies and ideas. "The children's imagination" would have been a wrong answer. Sats have turned many classrooms into places where children's imagination is always the wrong answer.
Article about me from Big Issue, Scotland
Here’s an obituary letter in ‘The Times’ I wrote for my old English teacher, Barry Brown
This is a political obituary I wrote for Chris Harman, an editor of ‘Socialist Worker’ who I knew from the early sixties
The fight for every school and every child to be reading whole books.
This is going on in several ways at the same time.
Friend, fellow-author and activist, Alan Gibbons is leading the Campaign for the Book here.
His website – always a great read – includes a link to my broadcast on BBC Radio 4’s PM about the importance of reading whole stories.
There’s a new group called ‘Just Read’ that is pulling together a set of proposals to make up a campaigning pamphlet to take to government on why they should be putting something in place to turn every school into a book-loving school. Here’s a news item about it.
I’m supporting and helping Pearson Limited put together a massive book-reading project going into schools called ‘Literacy Evolve’ and ‘Reading Revolution’. You can find out more here and here.
Here’s the text of a lecture I gave. It was the Philippa Pearce Memorial Lecture, which I gave at Homerton College, Cambridge on September 10 2009. ‘What’s Children’s Poetry For? Towards a new child-specific ‘Apologie for Poetrie’ (Philip Sidney 1579)
Photograph from left to right:Morag Styles, Reader in Children's Literature and Education at Homerton College, Cambridge/ Michael Rosen / Philippa's Pearce's daughter - Sally Christie and her son. Outside Homerton College. Photo courtesy of Carousel
‘Guernica’ at the Whitechapel Gallery.
This is the introduction I gave at the Symposium I organised for the Whitechapel Gallery on September 10 2009.
Here are my last two Laureate Logs:
Laureate Log 10
I get the impression that a head of steam is building, putting pressure on the government to carry on loosening up the curriculum and to make more space for reading for pleasure. What’s odd, is that it seems to be happening in a rather low key, almost covert way. As I’ve said before, I think we need a bold, clear statement from government that asks every local authority and every school to develop practical policies on how to make their respective patches into book-loving places for all. ‘Just Read’, the TV programme I did for BBC 4, showed that it’s possible. If we don’t get going on this, we will lose school libraries, local libraries and end up seriously discriminating against all children who come from homes where there are very few or no books. These are the children who find school so hard. Reading widely and often opens doors, and one of those doors takes you into formal education. It should be a priority to get every child reading many books and many different kinds of books. It’s the most pleasurable way we know of getting hold of complex and abstract ideas.
The first months of 2009 have kept me busy. On BBC Radio 4, two programmes I presented about children’s books went out – one about the 200 year history of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and the other on the Russian ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who is known to Russians as ‘Vinni Pukh’. I’ve also appeared on BBC 4’s ‘We Need Answers’ (a joyously nutty quiz show), ‘Bookaboo’, ITV’s book show for children, Sky TV’s book show, ‘The Daily Politics’ and ‘The Wright Stuff’. I’ve also been a judge on BBC’s ‘Off by Heart’, a show about children performing poems. It was down to me to choose the overall winner for the London area and I chose a seven year old boy who performed a poem by Grace Nichols as if it was a rock gospel number. Stunning!
Meanwhile I’ve been round and about doing shows, workshops or talks in Orpington, Southampton, Sheffield, Beaconsfield, Upminster, City and Islington College (for a conference on Gaza), Barbican Centre, Wavendon nr. Milton Keynes (for a poetry and jazz workshop with Tim Whitehead from the Homemade Orchestra), Edinburgh (Scottish Booktrust conference), Booktrust Conference in London, Newham, Norwich, The Stables in Milton Keynes, Coram Fields, Haverstock School in Camden, Solihull, a conference of Paediatric Anaesthetists in Brighton and the Bernie Grant Centre in Haringey. Meanwhile, my courses at Birkbeck and CLPE run on and I’m working with Hackney teachers on a Year 5 Writing Project.
On the progress of my Laureate projects: by the time you read this, ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat’ the exhibition on the history of poetry for children that Morag Styles and I have curated will have opened at the British Library. Do take a look at it – it’s in the foyer and free! The conference on children’s poetry is a sell-out but there should be a book of the papers and talks to follow. The ‘A-Z’ of children’s poets (from Agard to Zephaniah) will be published by Puffin in August. My idea of a poetry YouTube for children will happen with the London Grid for Learning and we’re just gearing up for the second Roald Dahl Funny Prize for the funniest books for children. As a result of last year’s prize, my 8-year old daughter has become an Andy Stanton addict!
Last Laureate Log 11
After two years of this laureateship, I think I can see that schools are divided between each other, divided between classes within individual schools and even divided within single classrooms. This division is between the children who live in what I’ll call Worksheet Hell, and those who live in Bookland. The last ten years or so has put state primary schools into a state of anxiety: how will we look when the league tables are published in the local newspaper? The route that many schools have taken to deal with this worry, is to spend hours and hours with the children who are seen as ‘slower’ doing what are, in effect, rehearsal papers for the SATs. So where a school thinks most of the children are ‘slower’, then this is what most of the children will be doing. Where a teacher sees a ‘slow’ group, this is what those children will be doing.
And what are these worksheets? They are imitations of reading. They are extracts of stories, they are (I quote from one of them) ‘part of a myth’. And the questions that the worksheets ask are about the supposed ‘facts’ of a story, its logic and its chronology. This distorts and wrecks the purpose of reading. It deprives the children of a chance to use their own language to engage with the feelings and ideas that lie in literature.
This is going on quite knowingly. I was quoted in my local newspaper for saying these things. This was the reply from a spokesman at the local education authority: ‘…if a class of mixed ability studied lengthy stories in full, many of the children would lose concentration. There is a strong logic to the national curriculum.’ Indeed, there is a ‘strong logic’ and it’s consigning ‘many of the children’ to a life of extracts of stories and worksheets full of dull, pointless questions. And that ‘strong logic’ says that ‘many’ children just aren’t good enough for whole stories. Is this where we’ve got to? Is this the level of understanding that people who run education have reached? In the name of ‘entitlement’ they’ve created a regime of segregation and discrimination. And it is discrimination, because if you deprive children of a chance to learn to love reading and books, you deprive them of access to the easiest and most pleasurable way of getting hold of complex ideas.
I think being the Laureate has brought all this into much sharper focus for me, whether that’s been through the school visits, meeting Ed Balls and Jim Knight, attending conferences on reading or making a TV programme on trying to create a book-loving school.
In terms of ideas, I wanted to follow in the footsteps of the four previous Laureates and leave some things that could help more and more children find their way to enjoying books. I did a series of performances around the country with other poets and out of that has come an anthology ‘A-Z of poetry – from Agard to Zephaniah’ which will be launched at the Edinburgh Festival in August. Most of the poets who perform their poems in schools are in there. Alongside that, it’s been a treat to create with Morag Styles an exhibition at the British Library – ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat’ – that celebrates the history of children’s poetry. As part of the exhibition there’s been a conference on Poetry and Childhood (a book to follow!) and a series of performances and workshops for the public.
On another front, we’ve got the Roald Dahl Funny Prize up and running so that parents, librarians, teachers and children can find their way to the 12 comic books on the shortlist including the two winners.
The last bits of the jigsaw are the things I am trying to put in place to encourage teachers to help children enjoy poetry. There’s the ‘Poetry Friendly Classroom’ webpage at Booktrust’s website, which is for teachers to exchange ideas and after the summer there’ll be a website hosted by the London Grid For Learning where children will be able to post their poetry performances.
I think the Children’s Laureateship is working. We’ve all brought to it something different. We’ve each found ways to stimulate different parts of the children’s literature process and I’m sure this will go on. It seems to me that we’re in a new phase in the history of literacy. The artefact of the book and all the different ways of putting things into a book are in a state of flux. Each time a school closes a library to make room for an ITC suite, it represents a moment of change in this history. Each time an education spokesperson says that there are children who can’t cope with whole stories, that too represents a moment of change. If we believe in the value and power of books, stories, poems and plays, we also have to remember that it will never be enough simply to publish good stuff. We have to be committed, ingenious, flexible and experimental in coming up with ways of making all that literature come alive for every single child – no exceptions allowed.
Thanks for having me!
This is the article that the Guardian published on the day of the handover.
This is an article that the Independent published about teaching Children’s Literature at University. Tiny corrections in the article: When I say: “The poems get taken up by the Eng Lit world. Suddenly, I find myself in the Eng Lit world…” that should read: ‘Children’s Lit world’ – both times! And UNL merged with London Guildhall University to form LMU. At the time of writing, University of East London is a separate institution.
Here’s a lecture I gave at the Poetry Conference at the British Library on April 20 2009:
Every artistic endeavour has a theory hovering around it. What I mean by this is that when human beings do things, we are not only capable of having ideas about what we’re doing, but that the very act of doing and the product of that doing springs from a world of talk, ideas and, yes, theory. There are several routes to unravelling this world: let’s take Shakespeare as an obvious example. Textual scholars are able to reveal from the intrinsic evidence of the texts themselves, the likely sources and secondary texts that Shakespeare was grappling with: the Bible, Ovid, Aristotle and so on. Meanwhile, a more historical approach looks at extrinsic evidence asking such questions as: What was in the school curriculum of Shakespeare’s time? What were the debates circulating the Court, the Church, Parliament and the Privy Council? Read the whole lecture...
This is the lecture I gave as my Visiting Professorial Inaugural Lecture at Birkbeck, University of London on May 12 2009:
Here’s a poem I wrote triggered off by the NHS asking me to write something that would celebrate the sixtieth birthday of the NHS. I thought that I was writing a poem for adults. It turns out that they thought I was writing a poem for children. It now turns out that it’s going to go up on every surgery wall in England and Wales. Read the whole lecture...
It’s always hard to discern patterns and trends, but I fear that we are in a time when libraries are more under threat than they have ever been. In this phase of the laureateship, I’ve been approached by several local campaigns to support librarians’ struggle to keep libraries open. For one of these, on the Wirral, I wrote this in early January:
‘Libraries have played an important part in the cultural and democratic life of this country. We talk of the 'republic of letters' meaning that we have created a world in which we share books as equals. This was only possible when books became free, which, thanks to a mix of philanthropy and municipal goodwill, was achieved through the invention and provision of libraries.
Now, more than ever, we need this 'republic of letters'. We live in a time when the main organs of information, entertainment and education (outside of schools) are owned by very few giant multinational corporations. However, within the world of books, there is still more diversity than in any other form of media. In part, this is because of the very process of reading books. Books are portable, durable packages where we can read slowly, toing and froing across the pages at a tempo that suits ourselves. Libraries are the treasure-houses that store these 'packages' and it's here that we can browse for free, to find the books that we want or need to support our lives and interests.
It is vital for the lives of us all that these places are supported, expanded, enriched and diversified. If we let them close, we are in effect consigning huge sections of the population to a world either without books, or a world with only the books that the giant corporations want us to read. This is an appalling prospect and I urge the councillors of the Wirral to fight every attempt to destroy your local library service and I will support any action taken by librarians to defend that service.’
I’ve come to think that a key to the survival of libraries is to be found in the links that they should have with schools. In many but not all places, this is casual, informal and patchy. If schools really put books at the centre of the curriculum, the local library becomes an essential part of that process and would prove to those who have the power to slash the library system that libraries are an essential part of our lives.
I’ve been doing poetry performances in Winchester, on the Isle of Wight, Bookmarks Bookshop in London, Seven Stories Museum in Newcastle, Southport, the Little Angel Puppet Theatre and St Albans and the poetry and jazz Nonsense project reached the Queen Elizabeth Hall on the South Bank. I also had the experience of turning up at a school with my voice gone. I did wonder for a few hours what I’d do with my life if it became permanent!
I’ve finished making a one-hour programme for BBC Four about helping a school become a book-loving place for everyone. It’s called ‘Just Read’ and it’ll be going out sometime in early February. The NHS filmed me along with several celebs performing a poem they commissioned me to write and I introduced a discussion on the French film, ‘Le Ballon Rouge’ at the London Socialist Film Festival. In the latest run of ‘Word of Mouth’ for Radio 4, I had the fascinating experience of going to Newbury Park Primary School in east London where they have a language of the month and a child who speaks that language is recorded talking. This goes up on the school website and the whole school gets involved in activities around that language.
I get the impression that a head of steam is building, putting pressure on the government to carry on loosening up the curriculum and to make more space for reading for pleasure. What’s odd, is that it seems to be happening in a rather low key, almost covert way. As I’ve said before, I think we need a bold, clear statement from government that asks every local authority and every school to develop practical policies on how to make their respective patches into book-loving places for all. ‘Just Read’, the TV programme I did for BBC Four, showed that it’s possible. If we don’t get going on this, we will lose school libraries, local libraries and end up seriously discriminating against all children who come from homes where there are very few or no books. These are the children who find school so hard. Reading widely and often opens doors, and one of those doors takes you into formal education. It should be a priority to get every child reading many books and many different kinds of books. It’s the most pleasurable way we know of getting hold of complex and abstract ideas.
The first months of 2009 have kept me busy. On BBC Radio 4, two programmes I presented about children’s books went out – one about the 200 year history of ‘Jack and the Beanstalk’ and the other on the Russian ‘Winnie the Pooh’, who is known to Russians as ‘Vinni Pukh’. I’ve also appeared on BBC Four’s We Need Answers’ (a joyously nutty quiz show), ‘Bookaboo’, ITV’s book show for children, Sky TV’s Book Show, ‘The Daily Politics’ and ‘The Wright Stuff’. I’ve also been a judge on BBC’s ‘Off by Heart’, a show about children performing poems. It was down to me to choose the overall winner for the London area and I chose a seven year old boy who performed a poem by Grace Nichols as if it was a rock gospel number. Stunning!
Meanwhile I’ve been round and about doing shows, workshops or talks in Orpington, Southampton, Sheffield, Beaconsfield, Upminster, City and Islington College (for a conference on Gaza), Barbican Centre, Wavendon near Milton Keynes (for a poetry and jazz workshop with Tim Whitehead from the Homemade Orchestra), Edinburgh (Scottish Book Trust conference), the Booktrust Conference in London, Newham, Norwich, The Stables in Milton Keynes, Coram Fields, Haverstock School in Camden, Solihull, a conference of Paediatric Anaesthetists in Brighton and the Bernie Grant Centre in Haringey. Meanwhile, my courses at Birkbeck and CLPE run on and I’m working with Hackney teachers on a Year 5 writing project.
On the progress of my Laureate projects: ‘Twinkle Twinkle Little Bat’, the exhibition on the history of poetry for children that Morag Styles and I have curated will open at the British Library on 1 April. Do take a look at it – it’s in the foyer and it’s free! The conference on children’s poetry is a sell-out but there should be a book of the papers and talks to follow. The ‘A-Z’ anthology of children’s poets (from Agard to Zephaniah) will be published by Puffin in August. Perform-a-poem, my idea of a poetry YouTube for children will happen with the London Grid for Learning and we’re just gearing up for the second Roald Dahl Funny Prize for the funniest books for children. As a result of last year’s prize, my 8-year old daughter has become an Andy Stanton addict!
Here are some recent interviews and articles:
Interview for Brighton SPACE
Newcastle ‘Journal’ writing me up.
Letter to guardian re: ‘whom’ and ‘who’.
My obituary of Adrian Mitchell in The Times.
My obituary of Adrian Mitchell in Socialist Worker and on the Guardian website.
A Redbridge school I visited.
A note on Robert Burns.
BBC website interview.
Audio interview on the Scottish Book Trust site.
Several people have asked me to put this up on my website again:
How to make a book-loving school
1. Does the school have in place any kind of home-school liaison where someone talks with individual parents about specific books, libraries, book departments, magazines, book clubs, book shows, that might interest this specific child and his or her carers? Interestingly, the great synthetic phonics research example, cited by government and everyone else – the Clackmannanshire experiment, did have one such home school liaison scheme in place, generously funded.
2. Does the school hold book events all year round with writers, illustrators, story-tellers, librarians, book enthusiasts coming in and talking and performing for the children and parents?
3. Does the school not only invite in a syndicated book fair but also invites in local bookshops, specialist bookshops and has books available for borrowing or buying to support the visiting writers, speakers, performers and story-tellers?
4. Is there someone in the school trained and interested in running the school library and who is on hand to give advice to every teacher to help them with their class libraries?
5. Does the school run book clubs for teachers, parents and children?
6. Does the school give every parent information – perhaps in the form of an attractive pack – on the local library, the local bookshop? Does the school take children and parents to these venues?
7. Do the school and individual classes adopt an author or illustrator for the week, or month or term and investigate, explore and do creative work around that author and illustrator?
8. Do the children make books of their own? Are these readily available for everyone in the school and parents too? Does the school encourage parents to come in and make books with the children? Does the school celebrate and cherish these books as much as it celebrates its most important activities?
9. Does the school encourage children to pass books between each other by means of book swaps, prominently displayed reviews, assembly presentation of ‘this week’s good read’, book posters and the like?
10. Does the school seize every possible moment - eg visits to museums, visits from specialists of any kind, school trips – to support these events and activities with books, eliciting from all and sundry what their favourite books are or were when they were children?
11. Are there regular whole school projects (like, say Black History Month, or ‘The Sea’) where a topic or theme can be supported by books of all kinds, all genres and all ages? Is the school on these occasions inundated with books?
12. Are assemblies and classrooms frequently a place when children are encouraged to become fascinated by something – anything! – to do with a book or what’s in a book?
13. Are the head’s study and teachers’ desks places where special, intriguing, exciting, ever-changing, odd, old, weird books lurk?
14. Does the school keep and use book reviews of children’s books from Books for Keeps, Carousel, Times Educational Supplement, Child and Junior Education, The School Librarian, the broadsheet review pages and the internet?
15. Is there at least one time every week where children will have nothing else to do with a book other than to read it, listen to it, and chat about it in an open-ended way?
16. I don’t think any meeting held by teachers to help parents understand what literacy is, should ever be without the presence in the room and the time to look at them, of such books as Trish Cooke’s and Helen Oxenbury’s ‘So Much’, Tony Ross’s ‘I Want My Potty’, Shirley Hughes’s ‘Dogger’, books by Anthony Browne, Penny Dunbar, Michael Foreman, Mick Inkpen, Lauren Child, Quentin Blake, Colin MacNaughton, Emma Chichester Clark and many, many more – apologies to those I’ve not mentioned.
17. There should be Beano annuals and football programmes open at the Junior Supporters pages, there should be books that tie in with TV shows and films.
18. Teachers could and should wrap up a meeting with parents with a read-aloud session, say, of a Julia Donaldson/Axel Scheffler masterpiece, with compulsory joining in!
19. Parents and grandparents should be encouraged to bring in and show off the books and magazines, no matter how humble, that they’ve kept since their childhoods.
20. The re-introduction of children’s literature courses on teacher and assistant teacher training courses.
One of the most inspiring occasions I've been to in this period was the prize-giving of the Sheffield Children's Book Award. The City Hall was packed to the rafters with children from schools all over Sheffield, waiting to see which of the books they had read and voted on had won. It was the twentieth anniversary of the Award and Martin Waddell, the first ever winner, was there along with many of the shortlisted authors, illustrators and their publishers. There were wonderful film sequences of the children talking about the books and then afterwards, hundreds of children queued to get their books signed. Halfway through this, my lightbulb went on again: every locality in the country could do their version of the award, with every school and child getting engaged in choosing which are their best books. It would mean cooperation between libraries, the local education authority, schools, parents, bookshops and the Children's Book Group. Is this possible? What's needed to make it happen? Anything I can do to help?
Meanwhile, I've been doing my usual visits. By the way, they are organised by the amazing Jan and Kate Powling at jan@speakingofbooks.co.uk or, when it's a Children's Laureate event, by the equally amazing Sasha Hoare at Booktrust at Sasha.Hoare@booktrust.org.uk. It was Sasha who set up an incredible launch for Children's Book Week at the London Eye, where we had some 200 children up in the capsules and then writing a huge poem at Southbank Centre in which the Eye talks to the Thames. You can read it on the Booktrust website.
The National Year of Reading held a conference where I read my NYR poem (find the poem on the NYR website). I've begun a scary cooperation with scintillating jazz musicians from the Homemade Orchestra who took my nonsense poems and turned them into a jazz oratorio. We've played Newbury, Guildford and the Queen Elizabeth Hall, Southbank Centre. I've performed in Rye, at the Bath Festival of Children's Literature; did three picture book shows with a wonderful Indian writer, Anushka Ravishankar, in Bexhill, Oxford and the Queen Elizabeth Hall for the Children's Book Show. I've performed my own shows for children in schools or theatres in Dartford, Telford, the Polka Theatre in Wimbledon, the American School in St John's Wood, the Cheltenham Literature Festival, Canterbury and Swindon.
I took part in a seminar at Birkbeck College on social realism in children's literature with Kimberley Reynolds and Julia Bell. I was very pleasantly grilled at 'Connecting Conversations' at the Institute of Psychoanalysis and at SPACE in Brighton. I read at an event for local writers at Stamford Hill Library; spoke on bereavement in Berkshire, read to students at York St John's University.
My yearlong poetry course for teachers at the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education has begun. I took part in a fantastic four days of poetry workshops at the Barbican ('Can I Have a Word?') based on an exhibition of photographs from the Spanish Civil War.
Laureate projects progress with the British Library exhibition (April-June 2009) and conference (April 20 & 21: enrol now!). The first Roald Dahl Funny Prizes were awarded; the schools' performance poetry website - 'Perform-a-poem' - is being designed at Booktrust and the A-Z of Poetry Tour will become a book with Puffin.
A 'play for voices' I wrote about my locality, 'Hackney Streets', was performed at the Rosemary Branch Theatre and my version of 'Pinocchio' is running at the Polka Theatre, Wimbledon. The University of Worcester awarded me an Honorary MA, Birkbeck College made me a Visiting Professor, France made me a Chevalier de l'Ordre des Arts et des Lettres. In between, 'The Wright Stuff' (Five) have had me on regularly to do a 'reading clinic' - advice for parents on their children's reading.
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