As the School Year Ends…

As you will see from our special Silver Anniversary brochure which is now widely available, Wells Festival of Literature continues to support a variety of educational projects in the area. The number of children and young people who benefit from this support is growing all the time.

Tony Walsh, the poet who has now become a household name since his moving recital after the Manchester bombing, is booked to visit 21 schools after the Festival ends. The importance of poetry as a tool to improve communication skills is being widely acknowledged. In fact Inja, the performance poet and rapper brought to local schools by Wells Festival of Literature earlier this year, is being booked for a repeat visit.

Wells Festival of Literature also supports storyteller visits and reading mentors as well as an exciting new project known as Plays in the Playground which has proved inspiring not just for the children but also for their parents. Actors, storytellers, authors – Wells Festival of Literature funds them to go into schools and run workshops with the children. One recent project involved ‘The Two Steves’ running writing/author workshops at St Benedict’s School in Glastonbury. The deputy head, Piers Ranger, expresses the school’s appreciation:

‘… the buzz they generated about reading is still ringing round the school. Huge thanks for helping to make it happen: in my view there is nothing more important to a child’s education than reading and therefore nothing more important to a school than to stimulate and excite reluctant readers. As funding is the main barrier to this, the work the Wells Festival of Literature are doing to promote this aim is priceless.’