2016/17 Competition

View the winning entries from the 2016/17 Competition by downloading the Winners’ Booklet here. All of the up work has also been published in the Never Such Innocence Anthology, available on Amazon here.

Children and young people from around the world continued to submit incredible work in the third annual centenary competition. For the 2016/17 Competition, we saw a record numbers of entries and participating schools, expanding our global reach to include Canada, New Zealand, Malaysia and Romania.  The Competition saw a very successful partnership with the Royal Canadian Legion and their National Poster and Literary Contests, which focus on the theme of Remembrance. This partnership led to six Canadian winning entries.

Following the success of the Gaelic poetry strand in the previous year, we were delighted to continue this and to open a Welsh language strand to the poetry competition. We also launched a pilot for Songs of the Centenary.  In partnership with Dave Stewart Entertainment, powered by Trackd, and with the kind support of IVE, we invited young people to write songs.  To make sure the songs project was accessible, we began offering free songwriting workshops to schools.

We updated the educational resource to include new country profiles on Canada, Germany, and Wales, and information on young people during the War, the British Empire, and Spies.

During the competition we embarked on a community roadshow, visiting exciting and prestigious venues with young people in Blackwood, Wales, as part of the Velvet Coalmine Festival organised by Iain Richards; the University of Exeter with kind support from Edson Tiger; Eaton Park, courtesy of the Grosvenor Estate; the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic with kind support from Dr Tony Harvey; HMS Iron Duke docked in Portsmouth, courtesy of Captain Chris Smith; and the Nicholson Institute in Leek, where we were kindly hosted by the Rt Hon Karen Bradley MP, the then Secretary of State for Culture.

For 2016/17 we engaged with children from 157 different schools and educational settings, a 40% increase on 2015/16. A total of 1,289 children entered the poetry competition and 621 entered the art competition.

Once again the winners were selected by panels of judges who very kindly devoted their time to deliberating, disagreeing and deciding on the final winners and runners up.

The Judging Panels for the competition included:

The Poetry Panel: Major (retd.) Barry Alexander, Meg Bateman, Ruaidhri Dowling, Professor Sir Deian Hopkin, Stanley Johnson, Eirlys Jones, Aonghas MacNeacail, Dr Viv Newman, Androcles Scicluna, Dr Martin Stephen, Anna Trethewey.

The Art Panel: Dr Jonathan Black, Caroline de Peyrecave, Jim Fellows, Ricky Graham, Rosi Lister, Flight Sergeant Gill Malam, and Nathalie Trouveroy.

The winning entries have been published in the 2016/17 Winners’ Booklet and all the winners were invited to the Awards Ceremony at the Guards’ Chapel, Wellington Barracks, by kind permission of Major General B J Bathurst CBE.

The 2016/17 Never Such Innocence Competition was supported by the Department of Culture, Media and Sport, Mappin & Webb, and The Leathersellers’ Company Charitable Fund.