‘Creative writing is hardly on the curriculum any more’
For a decade the small Scottish charity Super Power Agency has been running creative writing classes in Scottish schools, says David Robinson.
How would you notice if a generation of poor children was losing its imagination? And if you did, could you do anything about it?
To answer both questions, take the tram down to Leith, get off at the Shore, ring the bell at the Super Power Agency charity and talk to Claire Hefferan, its boss.
I’ve known Claire since 2019, when she trained me as a volunteer and yes, I am biased because I always thought her extraordinarily good at her job. This consists of leading eight-week creative writing courses in primary and secondary schools in less socially advantaged parts of Edinburgh and Glasgow with the backing of PVG-certified adult volunteers. People like me.
The idea was simple: with classes up to 30, a teacher can’t be everywhere, stimulating imaginations, helping with the very basics of writing and creativity. But volunteers can. And when the class’s stories are collected and a book of them printed – a real book, properly designed, printed, ISBN numbers, searchable for in the National Library and often sold at local bookshops – there is a real, measurable pay-off in terms of the pupils’ self-confidence and writing ability. I am convinced that this works and isn’t just wishful thinking: over the years, I have seen the results for myself.
All of this started ten years ago, when Scottish artist Maxine Sloss was so impressed by an American literacy charity run along these lines that she headhunted its CEO to set up something similar in Edinburgh. There was one difference. In the eight cities in which the US charity 826 National worked, their after-school writing workshops were based behind fantastically designed shopfronts. San Francisco had a pirate supply shop, LA a Time Travel Mart, and Brooklyn – the one that so impressed Sloss – had a Superhero Supply Company.
The Super Power Agency’s intention always was to set up something similar in Leith. When Heffernan, then a 31-year-old former art teacher, applied for a job a volunteer co-ordinator, the prospect of helping to set up Scotland’s first creative writing centre for young people particularly appealed. For one reason or another (mainly lack of money) it never happened. Instead, the charity threw all of its energy into its schools programme, which in turn has resulted in the publication of 72 books. As far as I can ascertain, nowhere else in the world has produced as many books written by children.
This year, the Super Power Agency is celebrating ten years of running creative writing programmes in Scottish schools, beginning in Leith Academy but now including 54 others. In that time, for all the Scottish Government’s attempts to narrow it, the poverty-related attainment gap remains stubbornly wide. According to the latest figures, over 73,000 pupils in Scottish schools have an attendance rate below 50 per cent and more than 6,000 don’t even ever bother turning up at all. A quarter of children leaving primary school couldn’t even read this sentence.
“What people don’t realise until you go into a classroom these days,” says Heffernan, “is the impact of the pandemic. Young people don’t look you in the eyes, they have their head down, they don’t know how to talk to each other, let alone adults. They are too anxious to come to school, and the well-being hubs at school [where disruptive children are sent] are full to bursting.
“But even among primary-aged children, who were too young for Covid to have disrupted their schooling, we are starting to see a decline in engagement with long-form content. They’re not reading. They don’t watch TV shows, though the occasional one might get through: Stranger Things, for example. They hardly watch films.
“I’d love to have the time to research this properly, but what we’re seeing when we run our eight-week courses is that they are now really struggling with the whole idea of plot – the idea of coming up with a story with a introduction, a twist and a conclusion because they just don’t see it in any of the short-form content – all the stuff on YouTube and so on – that they scroll through.
“We used to say to the volunteers, ‘If the kids are struggling, ask them about their favourite film and what they liked about the characters in it.’ But these kids no longer have that. They’re seeing a lot of vlogs, a lot of reality stuff, but they’re not really seeing stories.
“When we do get them writing, there’s also a huge increase in violence. Back in 2019, we had a rule that no-one could die in the stories. We couldn’t have that now. They’re all stabbing each other and so on, and I know it’s hardly a new theory but I wonder whether it’s all down to the content of what they are watching.”
So if all of that is the answer to first question I began with, what about the second? How to kickstart imaginations in deprived childhoods?
For some reason I can’t fathom, neither the Scottish Government nor Creative Scotland seems to be bothered with this – at least to the extent of neither of them having ever given a penny to the Super Power Agency in the ten years it has been running.
The whole point of the Super Power Agency is that just because you’re a child growing up in a deprived areas it shouldn’t mean that you’re also deprived of creativity or that you never realise the power of your own imagination. So in the less affluent schools, the SPA’s volunteers will carry on trying to get pupils excited about writing, to think about creating characters and describing their lives. All those eight-week courses will continue. Last year these involved 1,520 pupils in 26 primary and secondary schools, 91 per cent of whom said they enjoy writing more as a result of the workshops. Not bad for a tiny charity with only four employees.
Heffernan, though, wants more than that. “Creative writing is hardly on the curriculum any more, and the very few other charities like ours – the one Nick Hornby set up in Hoxton or Roddy Doyle set up in Dublin – all have their own writing centre. We want one too.
“Say if you’re eight to 18 and you are interested in writing, it would be a place to go. Right now there’s nowhere in Scotland like that. It wouldn’t be a youth club or a homework club but certainly after school and on Saturdays it would be a place where you could work on a topic – a bit like we do in our four free one-week courses in Edinburgh and Glasgow in the summer holidays.
“They are wildly oversubscribed and I think this would be too. I can just imagine it – maybe on Leith Walk, maybe on Easter Road. Maybe a course in playwriting from September to December, with actors performing it right at the end. All in this one hub which makes a point of giving young people equitable access to creativity. It’s not too much to hope for, is it?”
Readers wanting to donate can do so on www.superpoweragency.com, or by cheque to Super Power Agency, RTW, 40 Constitution Street EH6 6RS