Seven college students have their short stories published

Abingdon & Witney college are excited to confirm that seven of our student’s stories were selected to be published in this year's Integer book published by ‘Young Writers’.

In the autumn of 2022 Matthew Ruddle, English Lecturer for Abingdon & Witney College, challenged his Gateway and Fast Forward students to write a 100-word fictional story inspired by the theme ‘numbers’. The goal was to motivate and inspire students to practice creative writing, as it forms a core element of their GCSE English qualification. Matthew’s students were then given the opportunity to enter their story into Young Writers creative writing competition.

Talking about the challenge of writing a piece of quality work with such a short word count, Matthew said

“They had to consider sentence lengths, the power of punctuation, choose the best vocabulary to fit the word limit and also have a distinct beginning, middle and end.”

Seven of our talented students received the news in February that their work had been selected to be published in ‘Integer’ an Anthology of short stories. This week we received a physical copy, and our students were delighted to finally see their work in print.

Matthew Ruddle said:

“This was my first time using the Young Writers competition as a way to motivate students and I will definitely be doing it again next year. My students’ success is the icing on the cake.”

Young writers is just one of a huge number of resources that Abingdon & Witney College use to inspire and motivate students across Oxfordshire to be extraordinary. If you would like more information on how we may be able to support you, then please explore some of the links below to find out more.