Friday 16th January saw our Year 9s launching literacy into the weekend with their Slam Poetry performances! Entertaining the entire school in Collect with their energy and enthusiasm the performers delivered original spoken word poems with a stronger emphasis on rhythm, body language, performance and emotion than any written version could offer.
Keirat (Year 9), whose poem was about books and identity, reflected, “I enjoyed it! It was fun but also a little bit scary before [the performances] started. We started off by looking at some slam poetry and exploring the themes and how they are made, then we started writing our own on whatever topic we wanted. I had an idea that I wanted to do about something on the lines of prejudice and it just worked out to do it about books.”
With the National Literacy Trust celebrating 2026 as the national Year of Reading, it’s a brilliant opportunity for students to lift words off the page and share them with an audience. The slam poetry initiative, led by English teacher and published poet, Ruth Taaffe, has been a perennial favourite within the Year 9 curriculum and no less so with our current cohort.
Ruth explained, “Slam poetry engages young people in the art of writing and performing poetry where otherwise they may regard it as old-fashioned or ‘not for them’. Artists like Harry Baker, Holly McNish and Lemn Sissay have fired up a new enthusiasm for the spoken word form and we have studied some of their work in English lessons. Our Year 9 students have embraced the challenge of writing their own original work and then stood up bravely before an ever-increasing audience of their peers to celebrate poetry as a way of expressing their views and emotions on important ideas and life-experiences. All Year 9 students have participated in some way, culminating with the showcase Collect this Friday, and all their English teachers are immensely proud of them.”
Take the next step by selecting an option below, or if you want to drop us a quick message, you can do so with the form.
Δ