On Tuesday 12 March 2024, a group of our Year 7 and Year 8 pupils had the incredible opportunity to attend a poetry workshop with the multi-talented Spoz (real name Giovanni Esposito) - performance poet, singer-songwriter, film-maker, playwright and former Birmingham Poet Laureate and poet-in-residence at Birmingham City FC. Spoz has also performed at Glastonbury Festival and Cheltenham Literature Festival, as well as been commissioned by the BBC on several occasions. We felt extremely honoured to have Spoz come to Deer Park and work with our pupils.

This free event was part of the Year of Reading initiative that the Corinium Education Trust launched this year, in collaboration with a number of schools in the South Cotswolds, to encourage reading amongst pupils of all ages.

During the two two-hour poetry workshops held in the PLC (our library), pupils learnt about poetry and poetic techniques, as well as having rhyme battles and a final spoken word poetry contest at the end!

All pupils were thoroughly engaged and joined in with all activities… even the quiet pupils came forward and performed their spoken word poetry to the rest of the groups. Spoz was really impressed by the quality of the poems and the vocabulary used by our pupils. Overall, the event was extremely successful, and our pupils gained a lot from the experience.

I was rather envious of the opportunity our pupils were given to work with Spoz. His enthusiasm was infectious and the pupils' engagement in creating and performing their poems was fantastic.

Mr Clutterbuck, Headteacher

Spoz kindly donated two of his books - 'Spoz’s Shorts … and the Occasional Long One' (a collection of poems) and ‘Canalligator’ (a graphic novel) - to our library, which pupils can borrow if they are interested in reading his work.

Some of our pupils commented: