THE FIRST NOVEL SET is the most elaborate item in a range of stationery endorsed by the novelist Jacqueline Wilson, who enjoys god-like status among the under-10s. Her following has been expanding quietly for years, culminating in her novel Best Friends, on which the range is based.

Half a million of the kits have been sold and 40,000 little girls got the First Novel Set for Christmas, many because they asked for it.

The set costs £5.99, and is clearly designed to appeal to young writers who might otherwise be spending their pocket money at Claire’s Accessories. There is a pink-and-mauve notebook, plus a purple pen, a green pencil and a rubber emblazoned Oops! There is a sheet of stickers with boring essentials such as chapter numbers, a copyright line and a label reading First Edition, as well as hearts, stars, daisies and a smiley-face to decorate the text. Also included is “a special book of top writing tips by Jacqueline Wilson!”

“I saw it in a shop and I thought it looked like a really good idea,” says Isabella Nikolic, 9, a pupil at Kew College school in West London. “I haven’t started yet, but I’ve got a few ideas. My friends and I do really funny stuff sometimes so I’m going to write about us and the things that we do. Things like doing a dare to run around the garden in the dark at a sleepover. I am going to write about modern times. I think that would be more fun because I know more about it, though my favourite lesson at school is history.” Apart from Jacqueline Wilson, Isabella’s favourite writers are Michael Morpurgo and Dick King-Smith.

Ashley Wellington, 9, who goes to Fakenham Junior School in Norfolk, is another Jacqueline Wilson fan, and also likes J. K. Rowling and the American teenage phenomenon the Olsen twins, Mary-Kate and Ashley. She has already written the first chapter of a novel called The Magic Vortex, a magic-realist time-travel adventure featuring herself and her best friend, Laura. “It’s going to be like the story of Hansel and Gretel, with a nasty person, set near a forest.”

Ashley has a career plan that is both romantic and realistic. “I don’t think I’ll try to get it published, even if I do finish it. I think I’ll keep it until I am older. Then if I become famous and I become a writer, I might ask them to publish it.”

Both girls have only hazy memories of being asked to write stories at school, and neither has been introduced to Daisy Ashford, the 9-year-old author of the Edwardian bestseller The Young Visiters. Writing as a school subject went missing some time in the Eighties, in the Thatcher years, when the curriculum was focused on turning out functionally literate, employable citizens.

It is still missing under Labour because its results are not quantifiable by testing. Writing also looks suspect and elitist: it’s harder to master than the more “accessible” visual and performing arts.

The sudden popularity of creative writing at university revealed that many undergraduates had never written a poem or analysed a sentence, and in the past few years the subject has sneaked back into the secondary syllabus, although teaching skills have been lost as several generations of English teachers have never ventured into the creative branch of their subject. Now J. K. Rowling has demonstrated that, in terms of the national economy, writing is a valuable export. She has also made being a writer a glamorous girly ambition, up there with being a ballerina, a supermodel or a marine biologist.

Nevertheless, it has fallen to a supermarket, Sainsbury’s, to spot that children naturally want to write and there are big rewards in encouraging them. The literary passion that Ashley and Isabella share seems mostly spontaneous, inspired by the books they love and a writer who has a particularly close relationship with her readers.

“Children frequently write to me and often send me their novels,“ says Wilson, who wrote her first stories when she was about 8. Her inspiration was a writer called Pamela Brown, whose best-known book, about girl who dreams of a finishing school in Switzerland but instead grows up in a prison camp in Singapore in the Second World War, was written at the age of 15.

“All the stories they send me are delightful,” she says. “Obviously, most are not infant phenomena, but they want me to tell them honestly what I think. I always say, ‘Thank you for sending me your lovely story, I’ve had such a good time reading it, you have obviously worked very hard on it’. I just think it’s lovely that they have tried hard and they have actually written something.”

She has noticed an enormous change in children’s attitudes over the past decade. “When I do talks and I ask how many children like writing, it’s been very interesting. Ten years ago, hardly any of them. Now, usually more than half of them put their hands up. I rather like this, that reading and writing have become cool pursuits.”