Everybody Writes

This programme is no longer running.

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, up 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 come to an end, you can still watch this inspiring video that gives an overview of the Everybody Writes approach.