A renowned North-East author opened a school's technology library yesterday.

Children's writer Anne Fine, who penned Madame Doubtfire, which went on to become a cinema hit as Mrs Doubtfire, starring Robin Williams, visited The Hermitage School, in Chester-le-Street, last night, to open its Super Learning Centre.

The centre was created by combining three classrooms and contains a fiction, non-fiction and reference library, a computer suite with a dozen networked computers and a careers library.

Students can use the facility to access the Internet and use CD Roms and other software that will add to their skills.

Manager of the learning centre Lynda Robertson said they hoped to add more computers to the library, which was refurbished over summer.

The facility has been in use since the start of the autumn term but Ms Fine formally launched the centre.

Students use it to carry out research on the computers and is open before and after school hours.

Ms Robertson said: "The pupils use it before lessons start, at break and lunchtime and after school for activities. We have a reading group which meets a couple of times a week and next week I'm starting a CLAIT computer group after school. So it's definitely been put to good use."

Ms Fine was shown around the new facility and asked to sign some books.

The County Durham author, who lives in Barnard Castle, was Children's Laureate from 2001 to 2003 and has written more than 40 books for children and adults, which have been translated into 25 languages.

Among her national, literary prizes, Ms Fine's novel Goggle-Eyes won her the Guardian Children's Fiction prize and the coveted Carnegie Medal.

She won the medal a second time for Flour Babies, which also took the Whitbread Children's Book of the Year Award. Television adaptations of Bill's New Frock and Goggle-Eyes have been screened by the BBC.

This year, she was made a Fellow of the Royal Society of Literature and was awarded the OBE.