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PAM ROYDS 1924 - 2016

Pam Royds on Grasmere , 1971 with Sally Christie, children’s author and daughter of Philippa Pearce. I was just twenty two when I fir...

About Me

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United Kingdom
My blog is about writing and illustrating children's books which I have been doing since 1974. www.gillianmcclure.com has all my books. I also have another blog: www.paulcoltman.blogspot.com where I publish my father's poems.

Sunday 23 February 2014

SCHOOL INSPECTORS


I recently had a school visit that clashed with an Ofsted school inspection; not something that often occurs. The day before my visit, at the close of school, the phone had rung and two Ofsted inspectors had announced they would be arriving the next morning and staying for two days. It was the school’s Book Week. Not many lessons had been planned because of the author visit. The week had been freed up for follow-up activities and everyone was looking forward to dressing up as favourite characters in books, and enjoying a week of stories and reading. But the Inspectors weren’t coming to see an author in action; they wanted phonics and maths lessons. So after the phone call, the teachers had all stayed in their classrooms late into the evening preparing 'serious' lessons. The next day they were stressed, Book Week was fast becoming irrelevant and I spent the day dodging the two inspectors as they went from classroom to classroom looking for phonics lessons.
    How different it all was from another inspection four decades earlier when I was a young teacher in an infant school. I too was trying to give an impressive phonics lesson in ITA (the Initial Teaching Alphabet) but the inspector seemed more interested in a home-made picture book of mine written in the Initial Teaching Alphabet,  and the little boy from the caravan park who was sitting in a big arm chair in the reading corner looking at the pictures.

The inspector took the book away with him and sent it off to a publisher. It was as a result of this school inspection that I changed careers and became an author/illustrator after The Emperor's Singing Bird was published by Andre Deutsch in the normal alphabet two years later. 


My contact with that schools’ inspector didn’t end there. He later asked me to illustrate a book of his own. The name of the inspector who came into my classroom was Alan Jamieson and here are some of the illustrations I did for his book The Carnferry Gang.





Friday 7 February 2014

EXHIBITIONS


This is the mark on a wall where a picture once hung. I've had a lot of these marks to deal with and I'm left with a lot of blank wall. This is because the pictures are now all hanging in the Ipswich Art School Gallery; part of an exhibition of East Anglian children's book illustrators. My walls will be bare until May.
Coinciding with the Once Upon a Time exhibition, I have giclee prints for sale at Browsers Bookshop and Cafe in nearby Woodbridge where there is a good children's section. Sadly the children's bookshop Young Browsers closed last year.
In Newcastle, I also have some early illustrations from Tog the Ribber hanging at Seven Stories' new Storylab Gallery as part of 'Picturebooks in Progress' showing how a picture book is created from early ideas to final artwork.
You can read more about this brand new gallery and 'Picturebooks in Progress' in the Seven Stories Collection Team blog.