A HOYLAND pupil’s work was commended by David Walliams in a short story competition judged by the author.
Kwesi Ando-Kesson, ten, entered the competition along with the rest of his Year Five class at West Meadows primary school in Hoyland.
Run by Explore Learning, it tasked the nine and ten-year-olds with creating their own 500 word short stories based around a hero in their lives.
Teacher Ms Rachel Knox encouraged the children to think about everyday heroes, rather than superheroes, in their writing.
She said: “Kwesi wrote about a school caretaker who saved lots of children, inspired by a lot of the things he had seen on the news about shootings in America.
“He is a very bright child and very articulate. Kwesi’s story caught the eye of the judges and a representative from Explore came out to present all the children with certificates signed by David Walliams and Kwesi with a special runners up medal for our area.”
Kwesi’s entry stood out amongst thousands of entries from across the region.
“The reason school entered was because we had the chance to win a lot of books. And another was knowing that David Walliams would be reading all their entries as one of the judges, and if we had a winner he would have presented it in person.
“We have a house points system in school named after authors and one of them is named after him. When we did the entries we tweeted about it and David Walliams retweeted it, which got all the pupils very excited.
“All their work was really great to read. Another girl wrote about her little sister, who was poorly when she was younger with cancer - so she wrote about Dr Dan who saved her life. Some of them even wrote about animals that saved humans.
“It was quite exciting to read what they came up with as the ideas all came from them, with not a lot of help from us beyond structure and technique.”
