Roald Dahl Foundation
The Quentin Blake Award
An award is made annually by the Roald Dahl Foundation to a charity which has special merit and would benefit from additional support for a new project.
Giving children a voice
The findings of the Quentin Blake Award project have been published by Booktrust.
> Quentin Blake Award project report (801 kb .pdf)
Quentin Blake himself decides which organisation to support. Booktrust was recently selected, and chose to use the Award to carry out a unique consultation project which aimed to collect the views of children across the UK on the representation of disability (or absence of it) in children’s books.
In autumn 2005 every UK school was mailed with a consultation document and a series of workshops followed. Fittingly, the final workshop took place at the Roald Dahl Museum and Story Centre.
Booktrust will now focus on new activities to build on these recommendations and to support other sectors of the book world in doing the same.
Activity and workshop ideas
The Quentin Blake Award project has used a range of creative approaches to consult children on their views about disability in books.
The workshops generated valuable feedback for the children's book world, as well as creating a popular and eye-opening activity for the participants, and an ideal forum for discussing disability equality issues.
Booktrust is seeking funding to run further workshops, but would also encourage other schools, libraries and groups to consider carrying out such activities and feed back the children's views to us to continue to share with the book world.
Download some of our ideas for activities - or email us with your own
