Encouraging Young People To Believe In Themselves

It's The Teacher That Makes The Difference, Not The Classroom.

Our Great Problem, Is That Children Now Know Whatever They Want To Know - At The Press Of A Button They Can Discover All Horrors Of The Adult World. They Know Very Early On That The World Is Sometimes A Very Dark, Difficult And Complex Place, And The Literature They Read Must Reflect That. Otherwise We're Just Entertaining Them To Pass The Time.

One Of The Great Failings Of Our Education System Is That We Tend To Focus On Those Who Are Succeeding In Exams, And There Are Plenty Of Them. But What We Should Also Be Looking At, And A Lot More Urgently, Is Those Who Fail.

He Never Reckoned Much To Schooling And That. He Said You Could Learn Most What Was Worth Knowing From Keeping Your Eyes And Ears Peeled. Best Way Of Learning, He Always Said, Was Doing.

I Spend Months, Sometimes Years, Doing What I Call Dreamtime, Weaving It Together Inside My Head. But When I Actually Feel That The Egg Of My Story Is Ready To Hatch, Then I Can Write It In Three Months. Then I Know The Landscape And The People Well And From The Inside, But I Don't Necessarily Know Where The Story Is Going To Take Us.