It’s the last day before half-term at Bangabundhu primary school, just a stone’s throw from Bethnal Green Tube station in east London. Mandy Coe is leaning forwards, talking, passing around pens and paper. Bright yellow banners hang at the back of the hall, all sparkling tigers and smiling suns; and the coloured climbing bars of a modern school gym are folded back against the wall. The mood is relaxed.

“OK, I’d like you to write something now,” says Ms Coe. Suddenly, the mood changes - feet shuffle, chests heave, eyes take an interest in toes and fingertips. “Don’t be frightened. This is just your warm-up. I’m going to give you a line to write down, then I want you to write, without stopping or thinking, whatever comes into your head until I say stop. Okey, dokeyI ” She could be talking to five-year-olds. But these aren’t children; this sensitive circle is made up of teachers, classroom assistants and support workers. The normal, noisy hustle of East End kids is absent today. For this is an Inset day - on poetry. “Teaching poetry to teachers is more difficult than to children because they’re more inhibited,” says Mandy Coe. “Children just throw themselves into it.”

But the aim is not to turn these overworked primary school staff into classroom laureates. Ms Coe is here with fellow poet and former teacher Anthony Wilson, as part of a scheme called poetryclass, run by the Poetry Society, that aims to increase and improve poetry teaching in schools. Launched in March 2000 with pound;85,000 of funding from the Department for Education and Skills and support from Poet Laureate Andrew Motion, it provides poets to go into schools for Inset, giving teachers confidence, and providing ideas and techniques for inspiring their children.

“Poetry is embedded in the national literacy strategy, so teachers have to teach it,” says Anthony Wilson. “But it’s so prescriptive that many are hungry for ideas that are a bit different. Some teachers were taught poetry badly, if at all, when they were at school, so they’re nervous about teaching it. The more ideas we can give them, the better.”

Poetryclass is co-ordinated nationally by another teacher-turned-poet, Jean Sprackland. “There’s a lot more poetry on the curriculum than there used to be, especially in primary schools, but many teachers feel unsupported and uncomfortable about teaching it,” she says. “The idea of poets going into schools to teach kids is established, but it often leaves the teacher with nothing to build on. Our aim is to get poets working directly with teachers.”

Ms Sprackland has put together a pool of 40 poets who go into schools in England to lead Inset days and teacher workshops arranged by LEA literacy advisers. Like Anthony Wilson, she believes teachers may have had bad experiences of poetry at school, and most have had little contact with contemporary poetry, so are ill-equipped to teach it.

“With all the emphasis on literacy, many primary teachers are being asked to be virtual English specialists, which is a tall order,” she says. “We want to break down their inhibitions about teaching poetry, and the best way is for them to meet poets.”

The poetryclass project also provides teaching packs and resources. There’s a website that acts as a gateway to other poetry sources on the net, and includes sample poetry lesson plans, reports of poets’ visits to schools and examples of children’s poems.

Poetryclass is also keen to promote poetry as a tool for teaching language more generally. Jean Sprackland says: “If you have to look at language, for example - whether it’s syntax, grammar or sentence structure - poetry makes many of those aspects clearer.”

Much of the training is based on putting teachers in the place of the pupils, getting them to write and read poetry, using word games, puzzles, riddles and images to spark their imaginations. “There’s a kind of chemistry with poetry,” says Mandy Coe, who’s been teaching poetry in schools for eight years. “It’s not like maths, where there is an answer - you need to free people’s sense of inspiration. If teachers don’t feel inspired, the idea of doing that with young children is terrifying.”

It has worked in east London. Danielle Argue is a nursery and Year 2 teacher at Bangabundhu. “This has given me confidence and ideas,” he says. “We’re not used to being in the role of the children, and it’s good to see things through their eyes. Before, I was thinking, ‘How am I going to teach poetry to six year-olds?’ But I’m excited about it now.”

The Poetry Society is so keen to improve poetry teaching that the poetryclass project was extended this year to include training for student teachers. The pilot scheme for primary and secondary PGCE students at Exeter University involved two workshops run by poet Ann Sansom - the first exploring creative ways of teaching poetry, and the second, six weeks later, evaluating the success of students’ attempts to try these ideas out during teaching practice.

Claire Sepiani, training to be a secondary teacher, was fired up by her experience. “The last time I tried to write poetry was in school, when I was told to write about a train, and to make it rhyme,” she says. “So I was terrified of teaching poetry. Now, I love it. If someone had told me two months ago that I’d be teaching poetry and loving it, I’d have said they were mad.”

Other trainees tell similar stories. Keith Atkins’s memory of school poetry echoes Ms Sepiani’s. “When we did poetry at school it was a kind of trainspotter’s guide to the effects - ‘Ah, there’s the alliteration, there’s the rhyme’. But we weren’t taught how to construct poems.”

From the evidence of these student teachers, getting away from the learning-by-rote approach of the past and the targets-led learning for outcomes approach of the NLS has helped break down pupils’ resistance to poetry.

“When I told my class, ‘Right, we’re doing poetry this week’, their first reaction was a groan,” says Kate Goodwin, of her Year 6 children. “They all said, ‘Oh no, it’s too difficult’ and ‘Are you going to mark it, Miss?’. I said I was going to make poets of each one of them.”

By putting fragments of words on computer screens, taking existing poems with parts blocked out, inventing raps and using other ideas prompted by the course, Ms Goodwin got her way. “My objective was to make them not afraid of it. At the end they had produced a big book full of poetry and I had a smirk on my face, saying, ‘I told you so’.”

For Tatiana Wilson, primary English lecturer at Exeter’s school of education, this type of experience is the most important aspect of the initiative. “What stands out is the amount of fun they’ve had,” she says. “As a profession we need to claim back the idea of the child’s learning experience as something that’s valid - that it’s not just about outcomes. You can’t be a good teacher, or a good learner, without fire in the belly.”

To book a poetryclass Inset training day, tel: 020 7420 9892 or visit the website at www.poetryclass.net