CHILDREN from across Southend were treated to an English workshop from a Bafta award-winning actress.

Miriam Margolyes, whose many roles include the Harry Potter films, helped teach pupils about the work of Charles Dickens at St Michael’s School, in Leigh.

Pupils from eight schools across the borough visited the school for the day of learning, which was aimed at inspiring a love of the celebrated British author.

Organiser Hayley Sandling, who is the independent school’s head of English, said: “We were thrilled we were able to do it and to offer it out to other schools.”

Year 5 and 6 pupils from Earls Hall Junior School, Edwards Hall Primary School, St Mary’s CofE Primary School, St George’s Catholic Primary School, Bournemouth Park Primary School, Milton Hall Primary School, Darlinghurst Primary School and West Leigh Junior School attended the school, in Hadleigh Road, for the workshop.

Miss Margolyes, who is also a celebrated voice artist, gave a talk to the children and taught them how to read Dickens out loud with expression.

Drama teacher Cally Thomas helped prepare pupils to perform an abridged version of the Dickens novel, Great Expectations.

Ms Sandling said: “It was absolutely fantastic. The children found it captivating.

“They were buzzing about Dickens at the end of the day.The children got such a wide knowledge of Dickens and his work.”

Miss Margolyes is a lifelong admirer of the works of Dickens and has performed all over the world in a one-woman show, Dickens’s Women, in which she plays 23 characters from Dickens’ novels.

The actress, who won a Bafta Award for her role in the Age of Innocence in 1993, offered to visit schools to help promote Dickens’s work at a headteachers’ conference that St Michael’s head Stephen Tompkins attended.

Ms Sandling then got in touch with Miss Margolyes and invited her to the school.