A Brighton school has won a national poetry competition.
Brighton and Hove High School’s success was announced as hundreds of events are about to take place to mark National Poetry Day today.
The girls school won the competition after pupils created a multimedia presentation of The Clown Punk, a poem by Simon Armitage.
And the prize was a writing workshop and poetry reading with Armitage, which was due to be held at the school in Montpelier Road, Brighton, yesterday.
The result was announced by the exam body AQA (the Assessment and Qualifications Alliance) and Teachit, which provides teaching resources for schools.
They ran the competition to encourage teachers to engage their pupils in poetry using multimedia techniques.
Brighton and Hove High’s winning entry was described by Armitage as “daring, witty, wise and entertaining”.
The award-winning poet said: “Picking a winner was a very hard choice.
“But the winner had to be Brighton and Hove High School.
“It’s technically superb – nothing less than you’d expect from the digitally savvy students in the YouTube age.
“There are moments where the piece almost feels like a riposte to the poem, articulating the punk’s position rather than that of the speaker.
“I think this makes for a very interesting and exciting interpretation.”
English teacher Pete Edmunds, from Brighton and Hove High, said: “It would be fair to say I was over-excited when I got the news.
“I knew that the girls’ work was first rate, but for it to be picked as the best, out of all those hundreds of schools, and by Simon Armitage himself, is just massive.”
The shortlisted entries can be viewed by clicking here.
