Julie Blake Email and Phone Number

Poetry by Heart is a national poetry speaking competition for schools and colleges in England. It’s also a website for teaching and learning about poetry – by heart and out loud, and with plenty of choice for young people to explore poems and find the ones they love. It’s a resource for everyone in schools, in England, and everywhere else.In the national Poetry By Heart competition young people aged from 7-18, in key stages 2, 3, 4 and 5 choose poems they love, learn them by heart and perform them in a school or college performance event. A selection of performers from every region of England are invited to perform their poems in front of top UK poets at Shakespeare’s Globe Theatre – and the new Poetry By Heart national champions are crowned.Poetry By Heart has always been a partnership between poetry and education. It was founded in 2012 by poet Andrew Motion, UK Poet Laureate 1999-2009, and educator Julie Blake, and initially developed by The Full English with The Poetry Archive. This collaboration now been expanded to include The Poetry Society, the English Association, the Centre for Literacy in Primary Education, the National Association for the Teaching of English, Homerton College, University of Cambridge, Shakespeare’s Globe and Oxford English Dictionary. Poetry By Heart is funded with the support of the Department for Education.

At The Full English we create innovative designs for learning about 'hard' subjects. We are artisan makers of richly engaging digital learning resources and live learning experiences. The design is never enough, though: we are also really good at developing 'sticky' new audiences for cultural content. Recent large scale projects include: Poetry By Heart competition, website and print anthology, funded by the Department for Education and other partners; and All Talk, a digital and print resource for teaching and learning about spoken language, sponsored by BT Learning & Skills.

Research Associate on AHRC funded research project 'Decolonising Digital Childhoods: A pilot study towards enhanced participation and diversification in historical children's literature collections'.

Co-developed digital pedagogy projects to introduce research students and staff in the Centre for Research in Children's Literaure at Cambridge (CRCLC) to digital methods for working with corpora of historical children's texts.

Led the design and development of activity across the College to celebrate the 250th Anniversary of the College's foundation in 2018, including the largest public engagement festival by a Cambridge College. Worked with design agency to create anniversary branding and website.

Raised the profile of the Poetry Archive in the education community in the UK and overseas, through workshop leadership, digital content creation and professional publication. Consultant in the process of improving user experience and engagement with web content.

Taught English subject methodology on secondary English Post Graduate Certificate of Education. Tutor to a group of beginning teachers, working in partnership with a variety of local schools to support their in-school placements and professional development.

Teaching subject discipline content and methods to PGCE Secondary English students (part time).

Teaching English subject discipline and methods to PGCE Secondary English/Citizenship students, and Introduction to Language Studies to BEd Primary students.

Devised, taught and managed intensive residential courses for gifted 16-19 year old pupils. Seconded to University of Sheffield's School of English Literature, Language and Linguistics to work on English subject specific Widening Participation projects and to develop lecturer capacity and confidence to run events for school cohorts.

Faculty leadership for six years with additional responsibility for whole-college curriculum development and examinations. As part of the management team, improved college performance from mid-table respectability to honourable mention for excellence in Chief Inspector's annual report. Taught English Language and Literature at GCSE and A Level. Undertook Masters degree research into academic literacy and implemented its consequences in an innovative curriculum development project highly commended by the Open College Network.