In October children's author Brian Moses visited St George’s College Junior School for National poetry day, after his visit he suggested that St George's was used as a base for setting up a termly workshop for able writers.  

The workshop would involve children from local schools and would be run by one of a group of children's authors or poets.  The first of these sessions took place on Friday and was run by poet Clare Bevan.  Clare used to be a primary school teacher until she became a writer. Since then she has written stories, plays and song lyrics, but poetry is still her favourite thing. Her most recent poems are packed with magic and mystery, so she has fun performing them in schools. She has written an exciting series of poems about a magic castle complete with dragons, wizards, fairies and mice! Clare gave suggestions and ideas to the pupils on how to write descriptive stories and gave examples from different fairytales.  She then encouraged the children to write their own stories.

The able writers workshop was attended by pupils from four schools, as well as children from St George's there were students from: Holy Family, Addlestone, St Charles Borremeo, Weybridge and Cardinal Newman, Walton on Thames.  It was great way to bring local schools together.

Deirdre McIlreavy teacher from Holy Family School said “The children were absolutely enthralled with Clare Bevan and produced some wonderful work.   It was inspiring to have someone like her interact with the children and certainly it has given me some very exciting ideas for literacy work in class”