KATE CLANCHY

Kate Clanchy wants to change the world and thinks school is an excellent place to do it. She invites you to meet some of the kids she has taught in her thirty-year career.Join her as she explains everything about sex to a classroom of thirteen-year-olds. As she works in the school 'Inclusion Unit', trying to improve the fortunes of kids excluded from regular lessons because of their terrifying power to end learning in an instant. Or as she nurtures her multicultural poetry group, full of migrants and refugees, watches them find their voice and produce work of heartbreaking brilliance.While Clanchy doesn't deny stinging humiliations or hide painful accidents, she celebrates this most creative, passionate and practically useful of jobs. Teaching today is all too often demeaned, diminished and drastically under-resourced.Some Kids I Taught and What They Taught Mewill show you why it shouldn't be.

Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain and growing up. About all the things that poems are always about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving, they are also immediate - they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend.Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: Linnet Drury's poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times.

An unforgettable collection of poems by young people, edited by the award-winning writer and teacher Kate Clanchy.I text you how much it hurts not to see you.Here are poems about love, loss, mothers, fathers, God, rain, and growing up. About all the things that poems always are about, in fact, with one crucial difference. Instead of being remembered from an adult distance, these poems were written by a diverse group of teenagers direct from their own experience. So as well as being clever, funny and moving they are also immediate - they go straight to the heart like a text from a friend.Most of these poems are by pupils from a single multicultural comprehensive school, Oxford Spires Academy. Many have already been social media sensations: Linnet Drury's poems, for instance, have been retweeted over 100,000 times. All the poets have been paid for their poems, and a donation of 50p from the sale of this book will be made to the charity First Story to help further creative writing in schools.Friend: Poems by Young Peoplehas been edited by the award-winning poet, writer and teacher Kate Clanchy. A previous anthology of her students' work,England: Poems from a School, was published to great acclaim in 2018.