Cheltenham Festivals’ Reading Teachers = Reading Pupils (RTRP) programme has been building reading communities since 2016, bringing teachers together nationally to explore reading for pleasure. At EMC we’re delighted once again to be hosting a secondary RTRP group for 2025–26 as an Independent Partner.
This month, our group gathered for our first booktalk of the year, discussing Candy Gourlay’s Wild Song. Have you read it? What did you think? Let us know in the comments. To avoid spoilers if you would like to read along with us, notes from our discussion are attached here.
As always, we began by reflecting on ourselves as readers. Our opening question — “What are your favourite plot ingredients?”— produced a wonderfully diverse set of answers: from satisfying happy endings to devastating ones, from “setting the world right” narratives to stories with unreliable narrators.
These conversations are more than icebreakers. They remind us of the vast range of reading identities, tastes and experiences that we, as adults, bring to books. This is something to bear in mind when we think about children and young people too. Are we unintentionally signalling that only books with dense vocabulary or high challenge ‘count’ as real reading? How often do we forget that we, too, value pace, voice, accessibility and the emotional resonance of an excellent YA novel?
For anyone who’d like to read along with the group, our next text is the YA graphic novel Young Hag by Isabel Greenberg. We’ll be discussing it on 20 January, and the notes from the meeting will go up on our blog.
Teachers in the group also shared a range of YA recommendations with thematic links to Wild Song:
- Bone Talk by Candy Gourlay — the novel that precedes Wild Song.
- The Door of No Return by Kwame Alexander — a powerful text exploring the impact of colonialism.
- On Silver Tides by Silvia Bishop — a story about exclusion, identity and navigating tradition.
- Patron Saint of Nothing by Randy Ribay (KS4) — an American teen in the Philippines becomes entangled in the country’s violent anti-drug campaign after the death of his cousin.
As we continue through the year, we look forward to deepening our understanding of how to encourage reading for pleasure and how teacher reading communities can help keep our passion for books alive.
If you’re interested in the RTRP programme or want to connect about building reading communities in secondary English, I’d love to hear from you.
