A GROUP of pupils and their teacher from York are to star in a video which will show off their English skills to schools across the country.

Canon Lee School, in Rawcliffe Lane, was chosen by government experts to feature in a teacher training video, which will be used nationwide next year. From September, the literacy and numeracy strategies are to be extended from primary schools into the first three years of secondaries.

Canon Lee is one of several York schools which are sharing £1 million government cash to pilot the idea, which is aimed at making sure pupils do not stop making progress when they move to secondary school.

The camera crew at Canon Lee filmed a small group lesson given by teacher Tanya Andrle.

Kath Jordan, head of English, said the idea of the lesson was to show pupils how to add more adjectives and adverbs to bring their writing to life - not just to say "the elephant" but to say "the enormous, charging elephant."

The pupils and Ms Andrle, who is literacy co-ordinator, came up with a long description of a jug of lemonade between them, and they then worked on their own, all in front of the cameras.

"I was really nervous before- hand, but once we had started I felt fine - I'm doing it all the time," said Ms Andrle.

Tom Stead, 11, said: "It felt a bit weird at first with all these microphones over your head, but it was all right once we got going." Ms Jordan said the small group work, done outside normal lesson time, was just part of the new development, which was also seeing literacy and numeracy being brought in across different lessons.

Pupils had personal spelling journals, with lists of essential words for each subject. Teachers were also putting up displays in their classrooms showing commonly-used words in everything from science to cookery. Peter Dawson, who is heading the York-wide pilot project, said similar maths work was going on, and science would follow after Easter. Extra teacher training for staff in all subjects would follow, including ideas on how to motivate different kinds of pupils.

He said: "It's working well. We've given feedback to the Government on some of the training and development, and the teachers are working tremendously hard and are giving it a go."

Michael Jones, from the Department for Education and Employment, who visited Canon Lee for the filming, said: "This video will be used in every secondary school in the country. We are delighted to be here and we have got a teacher of quite extraordinary ability here."

The other children filmed were Nural Amin, 12, Katie Cooper, 11, Kerry Elstob, 11, Matt Hyett, 11 and Sam Starling, 12.