Over the last five years, he has worked for Creative Partnerships as both a practitioner and a Creative Agent, a role which sees him planning and managing ambitious programmes of creative work devised in partnership with the school community. Past projects have included the making of a feature-length film with each class in the primary school contributing five minutes of material and the production of a collaborative anthology of stories, poems and paintings based around the theme of quests (pictured).

For adults, Joel teaches the Advanced Creative Writing course at The Open University, offering a comprehensive overview of writing short fiction, poetry, novels and scripts for stage, radio and film. This is a distance learning course, with much of the teaching taking advantage of forum, email and wiki technology. Since 1969, the OU has been the UK’s foremost distance learning institution and, with a current cohort of over 160,000 students, it is the largest academic institution of any kind in Europe.

Alongside this, Joel has undertaken various residencies, commissions and programmes of work, offering workshops and mentoring to adults and children in a wide variety of contexts. In 2009, he was Writer-In-Residence for the village of Wisbech St Mary, as part of Cambridgeshire County Council’s Vital Communities research study. He is currently undertaking the role of Writer-In-Residence for the town of Corby in Northamptonshire as part of a year-long programme of work for the Our Corby arts & heritage project. In 2011, he was appointed Poet Laureate of Lincolnshire.

If you’d like to discuss booking a workshop, or want to know more about previous projects, please get in touch at writebadlywell@gmail.com.