Our guest for this episode is Pie Corbett, a highly respected author, poet and a highly influential educationist. He has written or edited more than two hundred books, including poetry collections, anthologies and books which are widley used in schools to encourage pupils' personal writing and the development of communication skills. 

Pie has been a classroom teacher, a head teacher and an Ofsted Inspector. He regularly lectures on education, has advised UK governments on education, and was responsible for the prominence of poetry objectives in the UK’s National Literacy Strategy. Pie was also heavily involved in the creation of the i-read software to help children learn how to read via visual and auditory props and he created the Talk for Writing teaching framework to enable children to write creatively, powerfully and independently.

In this first of two episodes, Pie talks about his own primary schooling and contrasts it with the much more creative and child-centred approaches which formed the basis his own teaching. He also talks about the importance of Ted Hughes’s Poetry In The Making and poems - particularly ‘The Thought-Fox’ - in developing his own approaches to encouraging pupils’ writing, and his partnership, as a writer and performer, with fellow poet and teacher Brian Moses. Pie ends the episode with two poems from his outstanding collection of poems for children, Evidence of Dragons.

Pie has been a regular contributor the Times Educational Supplement  and among his many publications are Evidence for Dragons  (Macmillan 2011), Rice Pie and Moses (Macmillan 1995) a collection of poetry for children with fellow poets John Rice and Brian Moses, Talk for Writing Across The Curriculum (Open University Press 2020) with Julia Strong; and as an editor A First Poetry Book  (2012 Macmillan) with Gaby Morgan) and The Works series of anthologies (Macmillan various).

The opening and closing music is from Beethoven's String Quartet No 14, opus 131, performed by the Orion String Quartet. (The extract is reproduced under Creative Commons licence IMSLP: Creative Commons Atribution Non-commercial No Derivative 3.0.) 

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