Celebrating Month of the Military Child with poetry workshop

April is known as Month of the Military Child. Each April, we recognise the important role that Military children play in the Armed Forces family. We work closely with Never Such Innocence who provide special opportunities for Military children to have their voices heard and we always look forward to the opportunities Never Such Innocence provide our Military students in school; not only for Military children but their peers too.

A group of 40 Service students and their peers took part in a poetry writing workshop led by Poetry Practitioner Andy Craven-Griffiths. Andy is a competent poetry writer whose work has benefited 45,000 young people since he began running them in 2007. As a poet, he has performed most extensively live on stage such as at Glastonbury, Latitude and BAC. He has also had work broadcasted on channels such as Radio 1, Radio 4 and BBC 2, and printed works in poetry journals including Magma and Ambit.

Students actively took part in Andy’s engaging poetry writing session where he creatively led students on where to begin with poetry and where inspiration can come from. Andy led the group in written tasks which scaffolded the final writing of the students’ work, enabling them to work towards this year’s theme, ‘Friends Near and Far’. Students wrote some lovely thought-provoking work entirely on their own which has been submitted to the Month of the Military Child competition run by Never Such Innocence.

Stephen Birdsall, Service Children’s Advocate said: “I was so impressed by the students’ creativity in the session. Andy was amazing with the students and actively engaged them in the various tasks to create their final poem for the theme of ‘Friends Near and Far’. I was so impressed and I was deeply moved by the upheaval and challenges that these students face. Please do read through their poetry submissions here – I really hope you enjoy them as much as I did.”