The weekend of July 9th saw myself and Miss McMaster (English Dept) take Hollie Roberts, Megan Bryan, Libby Griffiths, Amber Kamugisha, Adam Pearce, Carli Green, Matt Booth and Joe Staddon to Manchester to represent the South West at the 2010 Word Cup. This is a national youth poetry project which aims to bring together top spoken word artists and organisations from across England. Just like the football World Cup it is all about coming together to celebrate a shared passion – for the World Cup that’s football, for the WORDCUP, it’s words!

The students took part in a variety of workshops, meeting professional poets and students from across the country. They also watched The Manager’s Match where the poet coaches who had been working with all of the teams performed, including our own coach Sarah Jane Arbury from Spiel Unlimited.

Saturday evening saw the team compete against 8 others for the title of WORD CUP 2010. The girls held a packed audience spellbound with their All the World’s a Page performance whilst the boys reduced the audience to tears of laughter with So Long Sucker, a send up of Dracula. The response to both poems performed was amazing with both the boys and girls receiving standing ovations.

The final results saw our team take 2nd place overall and we also took the award for Most Striking Performance Technique. Hollie Roberts received an award too for the student in our team who had gained most out of the whole event.
I cannot praise the students enough for their enthusiasm, commitment and hard work. They completely embraced the ethos of the event which was to Speak Up. Make some Noise. Take that Challenge. They also made Miss McMaster cry during their performance, an event in itself!!

Huge thanks must also go to our poet coaches Sarah Jane Arbury and Marcus Moore along with Miss Butler for keeping us all on track.

“It was an amazing! The best thrill of my life. Never in a million years did I think we would win something, but when our names were called out for the most striking performance it was amazing there were 300 people watching and loads more watching on line. Overall we won second place, the winners were from Yorkshire who were really good and they showed so much encouragement to every team which was great!” Hollie Roberts

Helen Ogden, English teacher
at The Commonweal School