One of the highlights of the PGCE year is our visit to the Botanic Garden in Cambridge where, after a picnic lunch, the trainees explore the garden and devise creative writing tasks for each other, to be done at specific locations in the garden. We put all the ideas into a hat and each person pulls out someone else’s task and goes off to write. The afternoon finishes with the sharing of what we’ve written.

I’ve been taking trainees on this visit for seventeen years now, and the tasks are always different – and ingenious. Trainees might invite each other to note the names of two different species of rose and write a dialogue between them; they might be tasked with writing a folk tale about who lives inside the bricked-up tree; they might dare each other to become adventurers in the tropical hothouse, writing short stories about encounters with deadly plants.

It’s always great fun, and a wonderful way of drawing on all that they have learnt over their PGCE year – both as English teachers and as writers.

There’s also an invitation to respond creatively to the garden by decorating fairy cakes with writing icing, which we then share at the end of the day.