Young Writers 'competition'

[edpen]

Can we not have a campaign against this www.youngwriters.co.uk scam scheme?

I case you are not familiar with it, your darling children are invited through school to enter a writing competition. They might complete the work at school or at home, parent fills out the competition entry and sends it back to school for the school to submit.

A few weeks later you hear your child has such a "talent" for writing that they have "won" the privilege of having their work "published"!!

If you know most of the kids and parents and school you might soon become disillusioned to discover that the vast majority if not all of the children who entered are deemed similarly talented and have also "won". At this point you and/or your child might twig but maybe not.

You are then invited to buy a very expensive copy of this book (though don't you want some for grandparents too? We'll give you a discount if you buy more ;-) )

Sometimes, it is only when you get the book and can see how many are included and the caliber of the entries that you realise it is just a vast money making scheme.

On their website they state that ONE child per book (they are split into regions) receives a book-token' as a prize! Though Young Writers can't value that achievement too highly as the £10 top-prize book token is less that the cost of a single copy of the 'book' that the parents will feel they have to buy.

I am told the schools don't make any commission on the sales of the books but there are prizes (top prize £1,000) for the "best" schools in the series. Quite what this means isn't made clear. Could 'best' be the school with the largest number of entries ;-)

Please be warned and warn others. It isn't just the money. Both parents and children end up feeling very badly duped and manipulated by this scheme :-(

It seems a bit odd that this is being advertised as a competition. When a class did it at our school they were very open about it being an enterprise activity which was to encourage the children as writers and editors and also to raise some money. The school was open with parents about this from the start.

The children were really motivated by the fact their work would have to be of a good quality as it was to be in a real book and it encouraged their editing skills too as they proofread each others' stories.

Was this through the same company? There are others out there that do things differently.

But yes, if the school/company were completely upfront from the beginning about what this was (akin to Christmas cards and tea towels etc) then parents and children could make an informed choice about whether to get involved. But most schools using this company run it exactly as promoted, and as such it really is an exploitative scam. In my most recent experience of it the children wrote the piece at school and it was then sent home (full of spelling and grammatical errors) with a form for the parents to fill in. Every parent I spoke to said the same thing. Some of the work, the parents said, was so error ridden that even the children who wrote it couldn't read it back (I imagine those are the only entries that don't 'win')

Our primary school is doing this "competition" at the moment. I sent loads of links to our Headteacher and the literacy coordinator about how they piss parents off, send letters direct to parents' addresses and liquidated their previous company to avoid debts and taxes. I told them it isn't really a competition when the whole class "wins" and the parents feel pressure to buy expensive books.

The literacy coordinator responded by saying that they're not entering the whole school and won't be giving out addresses. However, they are still being involved with this company despite what they now know. I've said that my own children are not to be entered.

I haven't decided yet whether to "spread the word" among the parents. Would you?

The scheme more that 'pisses parents off it can cause real hurt. I think this article written a few years back in the Guardian explains it well and is completely consistent with my experience
www.theguardian.com/money/2009/mar/21/young-writers-competition

I absolutely would tell parents because that is exactly what I AM doing and they have all been very grateful for the heads-up or have told me of their own negative experiences with their older children.

Whatever prize the school hopes to win I just don't think it is worth the risk of hurting children and parents in the way I have seen happen and illustrated in the article above.

I think schools are often taken in as well. We thought it was a genuine competition until the letter asking for home addresses arrived and every child won!

We did this once ( several years ago) and would never do it again, despite the VERY misleading literature that comes into schools. It completely sells itself as a compeition and, unless you have come across threads like this, it is easy to take it at face value. Schools receive literally hundreds of competition/fundraising/advertising leaflets and it is very hard to sort the gold from the dross!

Yes, I have heard from teachers that I respect immensely that they had no clue what it really was until too late but that they then have never run it again.

What then to think of a school that keeps running it year after year?

I expected the school to cancel their involvement in the "competition" once they knew what the company was like. I'm surprised that they haven't and it makes me wonder about their judgement.

I told one parent yesterday and she told me that she'd forked out for some books a few years ago. She thought I should tell people.

Thanks for posting, I've not come accross this one yet. It's even sneakier than the art gallery/framing one.

We did this once years ago - I genuinely thought it was a competition and was appalled when I realised what it actually was.
As Literacy Coordinator it was entirely my fault because I should have read all the small print.

All credit to you aJumpedUpPantryBoy for stopping it as soon as you realised

Young Writers do their very best to hide what it is and as spanieleyes said, you do get a lot of bumph to wade through

It certainly taught me a lesson - I don't commit to anything until I have checked it out properly.