A cyber author first for a Peterborough primary school

Author Richard O’Neill will work with the school for the next year virtually from his base in Manchester.

Headteacher Sarah Cullen said: “We have a huge focus on literacy in our school and were determined that the current situation wasn’t going to stop our mission of ensuring exciting opportunities for our children. We will make sure they have experiences of a wide variety of quality texts, but working with an author will really enrich their writing.”

Richard, who is a national literacy hero and author of 14 books, added: “I’m really excited to be working with Lime Academy Parnwell on this the first online residency of my career. The headteacher has put a huge amount of work into the organising of this innovative project which I think will not only inspire the children, but will also inspire many more schools to follow the same model.”

All of the 330 children in the school as well as all of the staff will get to work with Richard via Microsoft teams meetings. He will also be creating new original stories and rhymes for the school.

There will be a mix of live interactive and recorded sessions as well as the task of working with the children and staff to create new stories, rhymes. For budding authors there’ll be creative writing sessions and a “writers Clinic”.