Join us for teaching inspiration to take poetry back to your classroom and give it the place it deserves.

Most English teachers know, understand and appreciate poetry; so this event begins, joyfully, with contributions from two fabulous, contemporary, award-winning poets, Malika Booker and Andrew McMillan.

Andrew’s and Malika’s poetry is taught in classrooms; Malika’s collection ‘Pepper Seed’ has recently been put onto the OCR syllabus. Malika and Andrew will be in conversation with Joe Barber: an 11-19 English teacher for 14 years, who currently leads the Secondary English PGCE and the Subject Pedagogy Unit for the PGCE programme at Manchester Metropolitan University. Joe is also a member of the English Association’s Secondary and FE Committee and OCR’s Consultative Form for English Teaching.

Malika and Andrew are both senior lecturers in Creative Writing in the Manchester Writing School at Manchester Metropolitan University, where they both teach poetry. They will join Joe for a discussion about the tension between the critical skills involved in appreciating and enjoying poetry and those required to teach it well. They will also discuss teachers’ experiences, perceptions and feelings about teaching poetry and its status in the KS3,4&5 curriculum in 2022, especially in the light of a 23% drop in pupils taking A-Level English since 2017, and English Literature not appearing in the list of top10 degree subjects for the first time last year.

This is your chance to contribute to the debate, or just to sit back and enjoy listening to an interesting hour of poetry and conversation. Whichever option you choose, you will leave inspired to take poetry back into your own classrooms and give it the place it deserves.