Latest literacy initiative offers a free trip to the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival for the winner of Kids on the Net writing competition
Nottingham has a rich history of literary journeys. Slavomir Rawicz escaped a Russian gulag in 1941, trekking 6,000km to freedom via Siberian blizzards and the heat of the Gobi desert. His findings were recorded in the ghost written memoir The Long Walk. J.M Barrie had a short spell in Nottingham where he worked at the Nottingham Journal in 1883 for 16 months or so. Each day, he’d walk from his home at 5 Birkland Avenue through the Arboretum on his way to the journal’s offices on Pelham Street. The Arboretum is home to a small pond and the Chinese canons, both of which inspired settings for his Peter Pan stories. But arguably our best known traveller is Eastwood-born D.H Lawrence, who set out on a ‘savage pilgrimage’ of self-discovery that would see him travel across Europe, Mexico, Ceylon and Australia in search of Rananim; a kind of Utopian community of like-minded people.
Of course everyday of our lives is a journey in some capacity. Most of us have to endure the annoying ‘voice overs’ on public transport, telling us when to get off and how we can join the city council’s Facebook group. We journey through our working careers as we do our relationships, drawing on the past to make better decisions in the future. Writers take a precarious journey from an initial thought to something concrete on the page. If you’re lucky enough to be published, your words then take a very different journey, as reviewers and book groups debate and discuss the merits of your plot and characters.
Journeys is the theme of the latest children’s writing competition by Kids on the Net and it has an incredible prize. The winner, along with an accompanying adult, will be flown out to the United Arab Emirates for the Sharjah Children's Reading Festival in April 2016. It’s aimed at children aged 10 -14. Submissions can either be about a real or imagined journey and can be a nonfiction account, story or poem. The competition judges are myself and Kim Slater, author of Smart.
Kids on the Net was originally funded as part of the trAce Online Writing Centre at Nottingham Trent University, but is now an independent social enterprise. Editor Helen Whitehead said: “We run occasional projects to encourage and showcase young writers, to explore the medium of digital writing, and/or provide opportunities for aspiring writers to work together to create something that's more than the sum of its parts. Once it was one of the only websites that displayed children's writing; these days there are many other ways in which children can write online, but Kids on the Net is safe in a way that a social network can never be - every contribution is vetted and edited before publication.”
Improving literacy levels is one of the core goals of Nottingham’s UNESCO City of Literature team and so competitions such as this are vital in raising aspirations and developing expression. The UK is rated as one of the most underperforming of industrialised nations in terms of literacy. Nottingham, is currently below national levels. Our pupils recorded a 14% gap to national attainment, particularly when first assessed at Early Years Foundation Stage (EYFS). In Nottingham only 60% of 4 year olds meet the expected level of Reading skills – this is 14% behind the national average of 74%.
When I edited together Dawn of the Unread I positioned illiteracy as a form of child abuse and made it the heart of our manifesto. Much good work has been done since. It’s worth mentioning that in May 2015 City Council staff began donating monthly from their wages and holding fundraising activities which have raised nearly £15,000 to help fund books to be donated to children in collaboration with the Dolly Parton Imagination Library. Given that public sector workers have had their pay frozen, this is quite a remarkable gesture.
Kids on the Net editor Helen Whitehead has done an incredible job in creating such a fantastic prize. She said: “Hopefully this will be the start of a new series of inspirational projects providing opportunities to encourage a new generation of young writers. As digital media becomes ever more complex, Kids on the Net will have to develop in some ways and that's something we need to find partners to help with - but we won't lose the founding vision of facilitating hundreds of thousands of kids to write for each other to read.”
The Journey writing competition is open now to UK kids aged 10-14 - enter via the website here. The deadline is 11 March 2016. Good luck!
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