Thursday June 11th 2026

When I spent the day at Lickey End First School, one thing stood out from start to finish.

The pupils wanted more…

More time to write.

More chances to share their ideas.

More opportunities to show me what they’d created.

And if I’m honest… a little more of my time than the timetable allowed!

In workshop after workshop, pupils wanted to share ideas, ask questions, show me what they’d written, tell me what happened next in their stories, and then show me again when they’d written even more.

It genuinely felt as though the pupils didn’t want me to leave their classrooms.

And I must admit, I’d have loved to have spent a whole week in each class rather than just part of the day.

In fact, the biggest challenge all day wasn’t encouraging pupils to join in.

It was finding enough time for everyone who wanted to share their ideas, read aloud, or show me what they’d created.

If that’s the only problem I had during the writing workshops, I guess that’s a rather nice problem to have.

By the time I reached Year 3, the enthusiasm was so infectious that every single pupil in the class received a certificate. I can’t remember handing out a certificate to every member of a full Key Stage 2 class before.

Something that happened at lunchtime made me smile, too.

I overheard two pupils from different year groups chatting excitedly about the stories they’d written during the workshops. Then several Year 2 pupils showed me some stories they’d been working on through their lunch break.

As an author, there are few things more rewarding than seeing children so excited about writing that they choose to spend part of their downtime doing it.

Thank you to all the pupils and staff at Lickey End First School for such a warm welcome and for throwing yourselves so wholeheartedly into each and every workshop.