CHILDREN at a Prudhoe school have penned letters to the Prime Minister calling for fund-raising hero Colonel Tom Moore to be knighted.

Year 4 pupils at Adderlane Academy, on Broomhill Road, wrote the letters to Boris Johnson after 100-year-old veteran Col. Moore raised more than £32m for NHS Charities Together.

Col. Moore, who received an honorary title for his exploits, walked 100 laps of his garden before his 100th birthday to raise the money.

The children wrote the letters at home after being set a task by Year 4 teacher Rebecca Forrest, who hoped Col. Moore’s exploits would inspire the children.

She said: “We’re working from home at the moment, and we set the children a task each morning for that day. On Wednesdays, it’s a writing task.

“I wondered ‘what can i do to inspire the kids to write?’, because they find it hard to write anyway.

“I wanted something meaningful that was in the media at the time, and there was a lot of talk about Captain Tom, so I got them to write a persuasive letter.”

After the pupils wrote their letters, Rebecca and her colleagues were so impressed they took to social media to try and gain them some publicity.

Rebecca continued: “It’s hard for them being at home. Normally for a task like this they’d have a big build up of a couple of weeks, and they didn’t have any of that.

“But it was overwhelming how well they did. The letters were really nice and the words were really lovely. I was super impressed.

“So then I thought we would tweet everybody, we sent them out to Guy Opperman and Piers Morgan to see if they could help spread the letters.

“I wanted to give them more of a sense of why they were doing it. It really worked.”