Teaching Library

H.I.V.E. (Higher Institute of Villainous Education) is a top-secret school of applied villainy where children with a precocious gift for wrongdoing are sent to develop their talents into criminal mastermind. After all, ‘villains have the best lines and wear the best costumes’. One small catch is that the children cannot leave until training is complete, six years later. With villainy comes a certain freedom of thought, and every year one student in particular will show exceptional talent – after all, it takes the best to produce the worst. This year there are two students: Otto Malpense and his new friend Wing Fanchu are both exceptionally bad, and they are definitely not keen on being held against their will for six long years…

Chester Howard can see Joe’s project ‘How to Write Neatly’ can only be a disaster. Joe makes a terrible mess of his work, jumbling letters and numbers up together. But a project called ‘How to Write Really Badly’ – now there’s something Joe can do better than anyone else. And Chester is about to find there’s a lot more to Joe than he expected…

In this award-winning Dahl title Matilda invents a game of punishing her parents when they treat her badly. She soon discovers that she has supernatural powers.

“Good morning, class. Today we are going to learn about Earthlets. They come in four colours. Pink, brown, black or yellow . . . but not green.”

In this way Dr Xargle, our friendly alien teacher, begins to teach his class about humans and babies. This is an hysterically funny book, with a particularly wry look at our natural methods and practices in bringing up babies: look out for the ‘egg-mangle’ – will you ever want to eat it again?

Meet Splat the Cat! It’s Splat the Cat’s first day of school and he’s worried. What if he doesn’t make any new friends? Just in case, Splat decides to bring along his pet mouse, Seymour, and hides him in his lunch box. The teacher, Mrs Wimpydimple, introduces Splat to the class and he soon starts learning all his important cat lessons. But when Seymour escapes and the cats do what cats do (they chase mice!), Splat’s worried again. Maybe now he’ll lose all his friends, old and new! Just in time, wise Mrs Wimpydimple takes charge and teaches everyone an important new lesson…Maybe Cat School is going to be ok after all!