Arvon in London Primary Schools

At Arvon, we believe anyone can be a writer. Since our founding in 1968, supporting the creativity of schoolchildren has been at the heart of this belief.

You may already know that we run around 40 writing weeks for schools each year at our houses, but did you also know that Arvon brings the writing magic directly into schools through daytime workshops that take place in the classroom?

Arvon is thrilled to be taking part in A New Direction’s Primary Arts Touring programme for the second time this year. Between now and the end of March, we’re going into nine primary schools across London, from Bexley to Brent, with nine fantastic poets and novelists who will work with their KS2 groups.

The aim is to get hundreds of KS2 children excited about writing, improve their literacy, oracy, creativity and self-confidence. Over two workshops, each class will create brand new pieces of writing and have the chance to perform what they’ve written in front of their peers. They’ll get to learn from professional writers including Zohab Zee Khan, Laurie Bolger, Shagufta Iqbal, Kat Francois, BREIS, Rachel Seiffert, Abiola Bello, Alex Falase-Koya, and Michael Mann.

We also aim to empower dozens of teachers by helping them discover new ways of inspiring children to write and build their creative confidence. They will receive training on teaching creative writing in the classroom – at no cost to the school. Poet Laurie Bolger has designed a free teaching resource for anyone to download via A New Direction’s website, so even more young writers can be supported beyond these nine schools.

If you work with children and would like to explore how Arvon could bring writing workshops to your school, we’d love to hear from you — or you can join our under-18s mailing list to stay in touch.