Sian Hughes finds a blueprint for fulfilling pupils’ potential as poets

Pupils from the Maharishi school in Lancashire have been scooping up all the major writing awards for young people for the past seven years. All the poems in Oranges have won major national awards, or have been featured in The TES Young Poet of the Week column.

The poems in this book are of an astonishingly high standard, regardless of the writers’ age. The inspirational teacher and poet behind the work, Cliff Yates, makes no secret of his methods: it’s all in his book, Jumpstart Poetry in the Secondary School (Poetry Society pound;9.20, order on www. poetrysoc.com). His approach is simple: he reads good contemporary poetry with his students, offers them opportunities to write, and values their work.

Nonetheless, the poems in this book have come a long way from their initial workshops or models. Even those that clearly derive from the same exercise have been redrafted and developed to a point where individual voices can be heard - at least two of the poets here are distinctive enough to warrant books of their own. This is where the difference is made between these pieces and poems produced in hundreds of one-off workshops with poets.

Re-drafting is a skill that everyone is required to teach, and poetry, often being under a page in length, should be ideal territory for practising this. But few teachers or pupils have the breadth of reading to know when a poem is made better by a particular adjustment, and the editing skills to know how to make those changes. Reading these entertaining and accessible poems, and looking at how far they have come from the models and exercises in Jumpstart, would go a long way to developing these areas.

Although Yates claims in his introduction that encouraging students to write poetry with the sole purpose of winning awards would be like teaching them to swim with weights tied to their ankles, he acknowledges that a structured system of rewards is important in his work. As great an incentive as a competition deadline is the lure of publication.

Thoughts in Corners: poems from six schools brings together poems produced in 15 classroom workshops in the borough of Maidstone, with the writer Chrissie Gittins (Maidstone Borough Council, free with SAE from Chrissie Gittins, 24 Elismore Road, London SE23 2S2). It is well-designed and pleasing. There are some excellent lines, some telling images, work that any teacher would be pleased to see completed in a double lesson.

The title suggests why the poems can be no more than this: the writers are using particular models or starting points, and their responses show ready interest, engagement, and talent, but cannot take the work further into their own voices without more exposure to poetry and opportunities to practise the art of writing.

One of the most popular writing games for developing poetry, the furniture game - in which one pupil thinks of another and the rest have to guess who it is by asking such questions as, “what kind of furniture is the person?”, “what kind of fruit?” - has clearly been used by both groups. Several more workshops used by the Maidstone pupils - listed in a full index of sources - come from Yates’s Jumpstart or from the Poetry Society website for teachers: www.poetryclass.net These books illustrate two parts of the same process, starting from similar exercise: one shows an encouraging glimpse of where it can lead, the other sees the full achievement of that potential.