A Free Visit From Our Author In Residence
Eden Boys’ School in Bolton are a recent winner of our competition to award schools with a FREE visit from our Author in Residence, Matt Dickinson.
Matt visited the school on a Thursday in mid-July for a full-day, delivering differentiated sessions to all the year groups. Librarian Navia Hussain described Matt’s visit as both “inspirational” and “engaging”, and indeed even on a hot sunny day, the last session Year 9 students were rapt. Matt made the visit relevant to each group he spoke with, and made sure to show off his own personal Matt Dickinson Web App at every opportunity!
Navia is a new librarian in post, and as such still has no library budget allocation at the moment, which means that not only has winning an author visit courtesy of Accessit Library allowed the students to experience such an inspiring event that they otherwise would have had no opportunity to, it’s allowed her to kick off her new role with a whole-school-engaging bang, raising the profile of the library with students and staff alike. Senior Leadership were extra pleased, as they’d tried to book a visit with Matt previously but were unsuccessful in getting him in.
As well as being a librarian, Navia is also an author, with her picture book There Is Something About Saffy’s Scarf introducing some young readers to the hijab along with themes of kindness and respect. Navia was pleased to gift Matt his own copy of the book, and we of course took the opportunity to purchase a copy too!
Although we have several Eden Boys’ schools as Accessit customers, the Bolton site is not yet a on board with us; one of many non-customer schools Accessit has funded a school visit to this year with our Author in Residence scheme. It’s so important to us to be able to support schools who may not otherwise be able to provide their students with access to events like this, so we made sure that all schools were eligible to apply to win a visit from Matt. We’re delighted to have seen so many entries for the competition and to be able to inspire students across the UK.
If you’re an Accessit customer and you didn’t manage to win a visit, you can still have Matt in school virtually with his Create Writing course, available on the Customer Portal right now! Keep an eye out for more great stuff coming from Matt very shortly.
