Pupils should write poetry rather than read it, says new children’s laureate Joseph Coelho
Pupils should write poetry rather than read it, according to the new children’s laureate, who said current teaching risks putting them off for life.
Joseph Coelho said it was damaging to teach children that there is a right and a wrong way to interpret verse.
Being taught first to write their own poems would make children less fearful and more inclined to learn, he said.
“So often poetry has been ‘done’ to us,” said Coehlo in his inaugural speech as Waterstones Children’s Laureate.
“It is my firm belief that we can undo some of that damage by writing poems, discovering the poet within us. Opening up the medium, releasing it from the confines of old weighty tomes and letting its blood flow through pens and stream onto computer screens.”
Coelho, 42, is an award-winning author whose books include the Luna Loves picture books for young children and the poetry collection Overheard In A Tower Block.
“There is often a fear around poetry. And there tends to be this general idea amongst adults that poems need to be studied and analysed,” he said.
“I’m all up for analysing poetry but not everyone is, and if that’s your only introduction to poetry I think it’s an awful shame. There’s not a lot of opportunity for young people to discover themselves as poets, to write a poem and to realise their voices are valid.
“Once you start to put words on the page, the words of others become more alluring. If they can get excited and passionate about themselves as poets, then it’s far more likely they’ll want to discover poems old and new.”
Coelho also said bookshelves should be “diversified” so that children of all races and backgrounds could see themselves reflected in stories, including characters growing up in working class households and single-parent families.
He was raised by his mother in a tower block in Roehampton, south-west London, and said: “I loved reading The Lion, The Witch and The Wardrobe but one thing I remember very clearly is that I felt like magic wasn’t for me. I didn’t have a big house, therefore the world of magic didn’t include me.
“And I remember feeling just a sadness about that. That’s why I try to create worlds and characters from the breadth of the community, writing stories based in tower blocks, because when I was growing up I never saw kids in tower blocks going on magical adventures.”
Coelho will hold the post for the next two years and succeeds Cressida Cowell. Previous Children’s Laureates include Sir Quentin Blake, Sir Michael Morpurgo and Julia Donaldson.
School libraries 'make so much difference'
Coelho regularly visits schools and runs creative writing workshops for children. He said pupils need to be allowed more time to use their imagination.
“Teachers often say that young people don’t get a chance to write stories or poems, and that’s such a shame,” he said. “If you can get them passionate about writing, you can then get them more passionate about the other side of things - the grammar and the fronted adverbials and what have you.”
If the Government could do one thing to help literacy in schools, Coelho suggested, it would be to ensure that every school has a library.
“Not every child has access to books,” he said. “If they have a school library, that would make so much difference.
“I didn’t grow up in a bookish household but my mum took us to the library a lot. There was one 20 minutes down the road, but if it hadn’t been within walking distance, we wouldn’t have gone because we didn’t have a car.
“Libraries have been hugely important to me and during my tenure I want to support them and celebrate them.”
In 2019, Coelho began a “library marathon” in which he aimed to join a library in each of the 209 local authorities. He visited 140 before the pandemic and now plans to sign up to the remaining 69.
