Jane Austen College pays homage to literary icon as hosts of Inspiration Trust’s Literary Olympiad

With the academy named after the literary icon Jane Austen herself, there was nowhere better than Norwich’s Jane Austen College to host the highly-coveted trust-wide Literary Olympiad.

With a love of literature and an English specialist at the helm as Principal. Jane Austen College opened its doors to all of Inspiration Trust’s secondary schools to run an action-packed event full of poetry, debate, awards, speeches and even book shadowing.

The atmosphere in the atrium was electric, full of support for the performers and encouraging words provided by friends and teachers a-like.

Things kicked-off with the poetry competition, seeing students present both original creations and popular classics to the audience. Followed swiftly by a heated debate that covered topics such as censorship and the importance of reading.

The academy was particularly impressed with the book shadowing - now a firm Inspiration Trust tradition, the initiative has been running for a few years and sees our wide array of Trust librarians presiding over their own version of the famous Carnegie Award Shadowing.

The programme encourages pupils from across the trust to read the same books and vote for their favourites, with awards being given to individual pupils for personal endeavours: those that managed to read the entire selection of books, and those that had greatly improved their reading by attending the shadowing sessions.

Finally, the day ended with a series of well-thought out, considered speeches that centred around the theme of ‘how can we change the world’ and saw students speak on a variety of topics, some of which included climate change, beauty standards and role models.