COULD this be a record? A Nelson school's link up with our Newspapers in Education project started in September 1999 and is planned to last right through the school year, boosting literacy and numeracy skills.

A group of students at Edge End High School have become avid readers of our newspaper, along with some of their parents, through regular use of our Super Story Search project.

Teacher Malcolm Croft is delighted with the interest and progress of students in the group and reports that our NIE material has proved a very successful stimulus. "Our pupils are really enjoying the work and especially enjoying earning the reading rewards," he said.

"They are all working towards targets and will be presented with the project's certificates in June. The material has great educational value and is certainly great value for money," he added.

The Super Story Search material, available only through our newspaper, gives every participating student a workbook setting out up to 30 newspaper reading tasks to complete, along with a further 30 ideas for newspaper based literacy work. Each pupil receives a daily copy of our newspaper, delivered into school during any three weeks, plus a set of useful small gifts as reading rewards. A certificate of completion is presented when students reach targets set by their own teacher and their names can be published in our roll of honour.

In addition to the literacy scheme, Edge End has also ordered our Maths Motivation material which comes with one week's delivery of our newspaper and will be using this with pupils throughout the school.

Class tours of our head office and printing plant are offered only to schools using any of our NIE resources and these are free of charge to schools ordering more than one set of material during the school year.

For more information on any of our material, including the latest addition to our range of classroom resources, our Pick and Mix literacy and numeracy pack, please contact the address on this page.

Edge End pupils Gareth Harris, 11, and Akif Younus, 12, are pictured at work on their literacy project.

Converted for the new archive on 14 July 2000. Some images and formatting may have been lost in the conversion.