Schools’ Programme

Our schools’ programme is shaping up for 2026

scroll down to find out about our programme in 2025

  • In 2025, thanks to our generous donors, the festival provided for North Norfolk schools:
    • 4 author talks
    • 2 creative workshops
    • 350 free books for school children
    • the North Norfolk schools’ poetry competition
    • subsidised transport for students from the University of East Anglia to Wells-next-the-sea for poetry Sunday

In association with the Norfolk Rivers Trust we promoted engagement with the natural world through 2 hands-on nature workshops in local rivers for primary-school children

Thanks to The Fishmongers’ Company’s Fisheries’ Charitable Trust and the Holkham Charitable Foundation as well as our partnership with the Norfolk Rivers Trust, our schools’ programme was free to all the schools taking part.

Find out what pupils and teachers said about their experiences by clicking to this page

Author talks and free books

Primary schools’ programme

Children from years 4, 5 and 6 at Wells-next-the-sea Primary School, Alderman Peel High School, Langham Village School and Burnham Market Primary School enjoyed author talks by Iona Rangeley (below) about the first book in her new children’s series – Cecily Sawyer – How to be a Spy. Each child took home a signed copy of Iona’s book:

Secondary schools’ programme

Alderman Peel High School Year 8’s visited Wells Maltings to hear about Natasha Hastings‘s middle-grade fantasy novel series The Miraculous Sweetmakers (below) and how to go about writing fiction. Natasha led the children in writing exercises, and showed them how to create an engaging plot and characters before handing each a signed copy of the first book in the series.

Creative workshops

Gresham’s School Year 12 (sixth-form) English Literature A Level students came to Wells Maltings for a fiction-writing workshop run by Natasha Hastings.

James Cockburn, artist, potter and former Head of Art at Harrow School, gave a class in drawing from still life to a group of Gresham’s pupils from Year 10.

Find out about Wells Young Writers workshops (new in 2025) here

Nature workshops

Primary groups from Burnham Market Primary and Nursery School and Langham Village School took part in river-fly survey workshops on the banks of the River Burn and the River Stiffkey. The Norfolk Rivers Trust’s Tim Fisher taught the children how to catch, identify, count and release water-dwelling insects – while explaining how changes in the invertebrate population track the health of a river.

Chalk streams like the Burn and Stiffkey are fragile ecosystems, globally unique to parts of the British Isles, northern France and northern Denmark. They have been increasingly degraded by human activities for hundreds of years.

Above: NRT’s Tim Fisher with three different groups of pupils. Each class spent two busy hours beside the River Stiffkey in October or early November, identifying and counting the mini beasts that live in the river bed and reveal what state it is in.

Student transport

Students from the University of East Anglia enjoyed a subsidised return minibus journey to Wells-next-the-sea and tickets to both poetry events on Sunday morning with Katrina Porteous, Matthew Hollis and Bernard O’Donoghue.

Schools’ poetry competition

Our schools’ programme also features an annual schools’ poetry competition. Please click here for details on our dedicated web page.

Many thanks to our generous donors who made all the above possible:

If you are interested in taking part in the schools’ programme in future years or you would like to know more about becoming a sponsor or making a donation, please email:

info@literatureandlandscape.org

For more information about riverfly surveying in Wells-next-the-sea’s local stream, the River Stiffkey, and to volunteer to join our group, please click here.