It was raining books at St. Antony's Catholic College as a who's who of the nation's favourite literary characters celebrated the written word.

“Improving literacy has been at the heart of a dramatic rise in academic standards at St. Antony's over the last 12 months and World Book Day provides a wonderful opportunity to maintain and drive on that surge in interest,” said Associate Headteacher Fiona Wright.

The Literacy Coordinator at the Urmston faith school Michaela Smith explained: “World Book is just one initiative in our goal to improve every single child's reading age. Each book in our library is assigned its own colour according to its reading age level with children striving to move onto the next level. We have book clubs for different age levels and also for those children who have English as a second language so we can get them up to speed as quickly as possible. We set holiday reading challenges with children having to write reports and answer questions on their holiday reading lists. We go into our feeder primary schools so children coming into Year 7 are given books to read and understand the challenges ahead of them and we have also introduced literacy mats with key principles of punctuation and spelling so children can check their own work as they are actually writing.”

Josh Donald Brown, 12, who came as the Gangster Granny said: “We all love reading books and want to read what our friends are reading next.”