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Everybody Writes
Everybody Writes is a project run in partnership by Booktrust and The National Literacy Trust and funded by the Department for Education (DfE). It is a resource for primary and secondary teachers, aimed at inspiring engaging writing projects for children and young people.
Project History:

Everybody Writes was a four-year writing project managed in partnership by Booktrust and the National Literacy Trust, and funded by the Department for Education, until March 2011.

Everybody Writes provided teachers with innovative ideas and practical resources to help them run projects to get children in primary and secondary schools excited about writing. The key principles of Everybody Writes were:

  • Finding ways to take writing beyond the classroom
  • Providing students with exciting stimuli for writing based on their experiences and interests
  • Establishing real audiences for children's writing
  • Writing across the curriculum

An Everybody Writes project could involve staging an alien spaceship crash landing in the playground to trigger a whole school newspaper writing project; creating a school recipe book for vegetables grown on the school allotment; developing a school radio station broadcasting children’s writing to parents; or running a science writing project where students explore creative explanations for strange phenomena.

The University of Sheffield, which evaluated the project independently, said: ‘Everybody Writes has been outstandingly successful in meeting its objectives. A wide range of innovative and creative work has taken place in schools which has impacted on pupil engagement and achievement and teachers’ subject and pedagogical content knowledge.’

Although the project has now come to an end, Everybody Writes resources including tools, case studies and videos remain available, and we hope that teachers, schools and local authorities will continue to use the Everybody Writes approach to make writing enjoyable and relevant for young people.

Everybody Writes brochures for primary schools, secondary schools and local authorities are still available free in hard copy format whilst stocks last: email education@booktrust.org.uk if you would like to place an order.

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Project Quote:
“This evaluation… has provided evidence that Everybody Writes has been outstandingly successful in meeting its objectives. A wide range of innovative and creative work has taken place in schools which has impacted on pupil engagement and achievement and teachers’ subject and pedagogical content knowledge. The projects have left a valuable legacy for other teachers of writing through the website case studies.” — University of Sheffield
Writers Involved:
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