How a high school book club turned into an award-winning podcast

But here, it quickly developed into something else entirely.

Today, the Reading Café is a ground-breaking podcast in which young people with a passion for reading get the chance to interview authors whose work has had an impact on them. Over time it has attracted listeners from around the country and even further afield; then, in 2024, it was announced as the winner of the Best Children and Young Adults’ Podcast at the Independent Podcast Awards.

The students involved are supported by two teachers (Peter Kelly and Fiona McLachlan) and the school librarian (Amanda McMullin), but this is very much a project that is run by and for young people. Everyone in the group contributes to help choose guests, develop questions, write scripts and run the interviews, and hosting duties are rotated rather than fixed, which means that by the end of this academic year every member should have taken on that role at least once.

In addition, they also have individuals whose photography and artistic skills are incorporated to add even more value to the final product – each episode, for example, has a bespoke logo related to its main themes, which can help with publicity on social media.

Over the past two-and-a-half years members of the podcast team have interviewed a range of authors who are all, in different ways, popular with young readers.

Elle McNichol, whose multi-award-winning 2020 novel ‘A Kind of Spark’ tells the story of an autistic 11-year-old girls, was a guest in December 2023, while the most recent episode featured Kat McKenna, whose book ‘Look What You Made Me Do’ explores fandom and has been described as a “must-have handbook for Taylor Swift fans”.

Other guests have included Matt Oldfield – author of the excellent Ultimate Football Heroes series that often proves hugely popular with the type of boys that might be diplomatically described as ‘reluctant readers’ – and world-renowned comic book writer Mark Millar, as well as people like Darran Shan, Aisha Bushby and Kayvion Lewis.

But the group’s biggest achievement so far was released in March 2014. This was the group’s first live broadcast in front of an audience, which inevitably added an element of additional pressure to each stage in the process. It’s one thing tripping over your words, losing track of the questions, or just going completely blank when those rough patches can be edited out, but with a room full of people to entertain and engage in real time, the pupils involved needed to be right at the top of their game. Of course, that’s exactly what happened.

Having interviewed various authors by that stage, the group decided to approach Ann Marie Di Mambro, a prolific playwright during the 80s and 90s and, more recently, a screenwriter on programmes including Eastenders, Doctors and River City. Amongst Scottish teenagers, however, she is best known as the author of Tally’s Blood, which is one of the plays that appears on the Scottish Set Text list for National 5 English, which was introduced in 2014.

The resulting discussion explores the play’s key themes, characters, relationships and insights, and even featured short performances of central incidents by other pupils – all in front of the woman who had written it all in the first place. The final broadcast has proven popular not just with Holy Cross pupils, but with English students (and teachers) across Scotland.

For many people – including a lot of adults – this sort of challenge would have been a hugely daunting proposition, but for this enormously impressive group of teenagers, it is now just the kind of thing that they do.

There is, of course, a huge amount of work involved in a production like this, but according to the pupils – who all have the pressures of exams to deal with as well – it really doesn’t feel that way. They are full of praise for the support they receive from staff to help keep everything manageable, but developing a “real sense of community” has also been a critical part of their collective success.

Two group-members with a new pop-up banner celebrating their awards success. (Image: Gordon Terris)

So, what’s next?

The success of that first live podcast has led to plans for another, with award-winning author and social commentator Darren McGarvey scheduled to take part in the coming weeks. In this instance, the Reading Café team will be working in collaboration with the school’s social science department, with a view to aligning the discussion with relevant aspects of the National 5 and Higher Modern Studies curriculum.

Much like the Di Mambro episode, this one is likely to be of interest well beyond the grounds of Holy Cross High School, and it should remind us that with the right support and trust, student journalism just like this can help to bring out the very best in young people.