The Mad Hatter’s Cake Eating Book Club at Sheepscombe school, has now been meeting for over 7 years. More than a hundred members have donned daft hats, eaten cake, debated, discussed, laughed over and analysed the book picks during this time.  

I wanted to write short piece about one recent and very special meeting. Aside from the regular year 5 and 6 members, this October we were joined by 5 old hands from years 7,8, 9. And 10. It happened that various local secondary schools had inset days that coincided, and the students had come back to help out and then elected to stay for book club.  

The meeting was electric. There we were, 6-year groups represented from KS2 to KS4, tuning in-tuning out, pausing to question and contribute, all on an equal footing. The primary aged children revelled in meeting secondary school students as reading-peers while our returning students were obviously delighted to be back in a reading environment they had loved. The key stage 3 and 4 students were able to chart their development as readers back to their time at Sheepscombe and the Key Stage 2 pupils were able to see what the next step of their reading journey might look like.  

At the end of the meeting, we had a chat about what RT=RP had meant and still means to our returning students. Aside from fond memories of cake eating, there were some stand out comments around the impact the project had vis-à-vis their lives as readers and on their learning. To start with there was the sheer enjoyment about reading as a group and talking about books; some had sought out similar opportunities in their secondary settings as a result. The students talked about the reading skills they had developed and which they still used in English lessons. And there was the love of reading that in some cases was attributed to their time in the club and which persists into the here and now. 

One of the goals of RT=RP is to create a reading culture and reading habits that is and are long lasting. On the evidence of this snapshot, it is certainly achieving this for many of our former pupils.