This article describes the outcomes of a research project conducted at the Ministry of Stories (a London‐based writing centre) which sought to develop an online, mentor‐assisted, writing platform. Across a 3‐month period, at four different sites across the UK, more than a hundred Year 7 pupils took part in the project, using the platform to write stories and get feedback from mentors who came from a variety of backgrounds. For reasons of space, pupil/mentor interactions are not discussed extensively in the article; however, these stories were collected and analysed alongside a range of other survey and interview data to establish how creative writing might be developed through online mentoring, the use of an online interface and the intersection of both these tools. The article seeks to answer some questions raised by the data collected in the project, and in turn, uses both the questions and the data to interrogate some of the discourses which surround the teaching of creative writing both in and outside the classroom, and in particular the tensions that occur between the teaching of writing skills, ‘official versions’ of writing in the classroom and children's use of their own cultural resources in creative writing.

Engaging with digital media is part of everyday living for the majority of children, yet opportunities to learn about, through and with media are denied many pupils in compulsory schooling. Whilst Media Studies in the UK is internationally reputed to be well established, changes made to the primary and secondary national curriculum in 2014 included removal of existing media study elements. We demonstrate what is lost by these actions in relation to the United Nations Rights of the Child and, in particular, the right of the child to express identity.We demonstrate how media literacy had previously been included in curriculum, enabling opportunities to address children's rights, and propose that the absence of media education is part of an overall trend of the non-prioritisation of children's rights in England and Northern Ireland. The paper calls for media literacy to be reintroduced into primary and secondary curriculum.

The notion of cultural capital, defined in its Arnoldian sense, of "the best that has been thought and said", has been at the centre of the Conservative government's education policy for the last few years in England. While it is clear that this version of cultural capital -different from the sense in which it was used by Pierre Bourdieu, who popularised the term -has been deployed to valorise certain types of social, educational and cultural knowledge, it is not clear at all what use teachers make of the term or indeed, how they view it. This article presents data from an evaluation of a programme for disadvantaged students in English primary and secondary schools that sought to make a focus on cultural capital, and tries to assess how teachers perceive and use the term. The article posits that teachers see exhortations to accumulate cultural capital as part of their role, but in much broader terms than the government does, and that they seek to fill the "vacuum" created by the current policy perspective on cultural capital.

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