It’s no mean feat to inspire a group of 30 10- and 11-year-olds to run across a room and start writing. But run they do. Propped against plaster pillars, perched on a leather sofa, laid on ornamental grass, stories pour out of these children.
This morning they have entered a magical apothecary (to gasps of wonder), passed through a secret doorway (more gasps), climbed a winding staircase and ended in a room laid out like an enchanted garden. With the help of volunteer story mentors they’ve imagined an eagle-winged mouse that smells of cheese and a semi-invisible blue bird with a monkey’s head and clown’s shoes. The main action takes place in a regenerating block of cheese. Somehow a shark has been introduced for the cliffhanger. Now it’s up to each child to decide how their story will end.
Gradually the children make their way to their delighted teacher. “Can I show you my writing, Mr Tankard?” one asks proudly. Others are bursting to do the same.
At Grimm & Co, this children’s writing centre in the heart of Rotherham, the children’s willingness to write, their wide-eyed wonder as they move around the space and discuss and develop their ideas, is all the more welcome as many young people in the area have problems with confidence, self-esteem and imagination. Reluctant readers and writers abound. English is often an additional language.
Ian Tankard, assistant headteacher of Rotherham’s East Dene primary school, marvels at the children’s willingness to write here: “They’ve broken through more in this session than in a year. It’s amazing this is on our doorstep.”
The force behind Grimm & Co is Deborah Bullivant, an academic tasked in 2011 with turning around consistently low key stage 2 literacy results among disadvantaged children in the area. Although much is being done to raise Rotherham’s profile, the local authority is 52nd in the government’s 2015 index of multiple deprivation, within the 16% most deprived districts in England, and literacy results at the end of primary school are consistently at least 5% below national benchmarks.
To combat the town’s education problems Rotherham council submitted a proposal to study the effect of creative literacy approaches on Sats results at the end of primary school. Bullivant, born in Sheffield and with a long background in education and children’s charities, was recruited to lead the study, with funding from the regional development agency.
The study, undertaken with Sheffield University, concluded the most effective means of helping these children was to lift them out of their sometimes chaotic everyday lives and offer individual mentoring. The model was trialled across all schools in Rotherham, and within a year boys’ Sats results had improved by 11%. Among children with English as an additional language, results for reading and writing were 22% higher. “We knew we couldn’t just leave this,” says Bullivant. “We had to do something.”
In her search for a suitable model, Bullivant came across a TED talk by the American author Dave Eggers, who had set up a pirate-themed writing and mentoring centre for disadvantaged children in San Francisco. This inspired London’s Ministry of Stories. After consultation with local children, Bullivant lighted on a “magical apothecary”, and Grimm & Co was born.
Bullivant and her team of volunteers have worked tirelessly to get the centre off the ground. Since the literacy research project ended Bullivant has secured national funding from Arts Council England and others, and sought backers to help bring her vision to life. The great and the good have lined up to offer time and support: screenwriter Jeremy Dyson, author Joanne Harris, actor Paul Clayton, poet Ian McMillan, Boomtown Rat Sir Bob Geldof. “You become a parent,” says Dyson, “and become aware of what you can do for your own kids, but you’re also painfully aware that’s not the case across the board.”
That Grimm & Co is in South Yorkshire is important for Dyson, best known as the non-performing quarter of the League of Gentlemen: “I’m a passionate Yorkshire person. Not in a Geoff Boycott way, but there didn’t used to be such an imbalance between the south-east and the rest of the regions, particularly when it comes to cultural organisations. If you live in London there are so many places you can wander into that will inspire.”
Inspiration is central to what Grimm & Co hopes to achieve, so Bullivant was determined to offer a magnificent space. She secured the rent of a grand Victorian building – a former ladies’ department store turned pub that had fallen into disrepair – and set about transforming it to bring the magical apothecary to life.
For Harris, best known for Chocolat, who has been a trustee for the past 18 months, a place for creativity is vital: “Grimm & Co is a physical reminder to children that their imagination counts for something, that creativity matters. I don’t think schools have taught that for a long time. There’s a disconnect between the things teachers are expected to teach at school and what intuitively they would like to teach.”
At Rotherham’s Roughwood primary, children and teachers were so impressed with their experience at Grimm & Co they changed their term’s topic to reflect Grimm’s approach. “It sounds gushing to say but it was fabulous,” says Kevan Cadman, deputy headteacher. “The reaction of the children was what impressed us. We were there for three hours and they never once asked for a break; they were working and story writing for three hours.”
Roughwood created a “magical market” as the culmination of a term’s work on magical beings, with origami venus “eyetraps”, papier-mache dragons’ eggs and ogre-eye cake pops to sell in the hall. The classroom walls were decorated with the students’ magical creatures and their poems imagining what was inside a closed box: “Souls, lost lonely souls” according to one, or “a witch’s wand as dark as the darkest spells”.
“This is not what I was expecting to come out of these children,” says Cadman, proud and still a little incredulous. “What we think has made the difference is allowing the children to be playful, and to see the teachers be playful. There are children who have ideas in there, but it doesn’t come out. When it’s fantastical, when there’s no right and wrong, it’s allowed to come out.”
The proceeds of the market are being donated to support Grimm & Co’s work. “A lot of our children don’t have imaginative play when they’re little,” Cadman says. “Grimm & Co gives them that, it’s developing a rounded person.”
Back at East Dene primary next day, the pupils are still full of their experience. One girl has already signed up for Grimm’s free after-school club. Perhaps she’ll join one of their classes on “unthinking”, or create a talisman, as Bullivant tells me another Rotherham child has done: “He produced his little bottle and said his grandfather had died, so he’d included all these things about golf and fishing that reminded him of his grandad. He’d written out a story they used to share and sealed a message in the top that was just between him and his grandad.” In what has been a dark time for Rotherham, Grimm & Co may just be that town’s talisman.
