Opening new doors

The cornerstones of the Learning and Performance Network (LPN) are the principles that underpin the Royal Shakespeare Company’s (RSC) education programme: See it live, start it young and do it on your feet. It is a Shakespeare and performance project embedded in Stratford rehearsal room practice, yet reaches far beyond.

Where previously many students had turned away from learning altogether they have undoubtedly been switched on by this work

While its impact on the drift away from arts subjects at Key Stage 4 in schools remains to be clearly evidenced, it has demonstrated how drama is being used, not only to change perceptions of Shakespeare but to unlock new learning opportunities and open doors for students.

Active approaches

Some very famous doors indeed have been opened, not least by a group of students from Ethelbert Road Primary School in Faversham, who tumbled through that of Number 10. The programme has had an uncanny knack of making lofty aspirations feel closer and more attainable. Downing Street became their Elsinore. With Prince Hamlet, they explored the corridors of power and interrogated their workings.

Elsewhere, I have been ‘whooshed’ (technical term for a dramatic and rapid storytelling technique) around the workings of the human digestive tract by students from Canterbury Academy.

These active approaches underpin the practice of the LPN. Focused around performance opportunities and skilling up teachers, it is a partnership that The Marlowe in Canterbury, 20 local schools and the RSC have developed over the last four years as part of a nationwide network of schools and theatre.

Changing perceptions

Yet there is a risk with a programme of the scale and reach of the LPN (and now its successor the Associate Schools Programme), led by a national organisation, that it prescribes a ‘one size fits all’ solution to schools with diverse challenges, serving diverse communities.

Directed from afar, we risk presenting inflexible programmes that don’t speak or listen to local voices − a centralised, elitist Shakespeare − rather than one infused with distinct regional resonances. There is a very real danger of reinforcing an austere perception of Shakespeare as ‘culture’, emanating from a distant source of knowledge rather than as an integral part of that complex whole that shapes our lives.

Or, more succinctly “Shakespeare − that’s for posh people”, as a student from the Orchard School (for students with emotional and behavioural difficulties) shrugged dismissively at the start of their engagement. Yet within two years they were performing with fluidity and confidence on our stage in front of 700 people, alongside 200 of their peers from mainstream schools.

Now that student’s response is what are they doing next. Every school and every teacher understands the necessity of a personal approach sensitive to the students’ needs, their prior knowledge and what inspires them.

Whether looking out to Goodwin Sands (the site of Antonio’s shipwreck in The Merchant of Venice) or at Henry IV’s tomb in Canterbury Cathedral, Shakespeare’s stories emerged out of Kent’s places and landscape. Furthermore, they came into being through inspiration and indeed collaboration with a man of Kent, that roguish rock star of the Renaissance stage and our theatre’s namesake, Christopher Marlowe.

One performance involved 150 students from nine schools performing A Midsummer Night’s Dream as a promenade along the seafront connecting the Turner Contemporary with the Dreamland amusement park in Margate.

Between 40 and 60% of those attending LPN events are new theatre bookers, showing how powerful it has been in supporting access and audience development.

Switched into learning

In Kent, grammar schools co-exist with a high number of non-grammar schools, many of which have been labelled as failing. When we set out on this journey, a number of active partner schools in our network had the dubious distinction of being part of the crisis in coastal schools alluded to by head of Ofsted Sir Michael Wilshaw.

Some had among the lowest exam pass rates in the country. We are not claiming that our project was the only reason behind recent improvements at these schools, but where previously many students had turned away from learning altogether they have undoubtedly been switched on by this work.

Understanding this local context of education and of culture is key to the project’s success. The hub schools (King Ethelbert’s Birchington and Canterbury High School) that we have worked with embed these projects in the community. Teacher satisfaction with the project has been very high with an average rating of 5/5 for all key questions about the value to learning and students, and teacher experience never dipping below 4.5/5.

It further indicates that students and parents are more connected and positive about the cultural centres in their community. These stages and places are theirs to explore and in which to create.

Teaching with heart and soul

Teachers are in the driving seat, although we have challenged them to move beyond ‘the canon within the canon’ which restricts and leaves those old favourites, such as Romeo and Juliet, feeling rather overworn. Many are now as comfortable with Henry IV Part One, Timon or Titus Andronicus, while as one teacher put it she feels emboldened “with the sheer boundless freedom of being able to teach from the heart and soul”.

The legacy project the Associate Schools Programme will no doubt teach us more about what is possible. My guess is anything.

Andy Dawson is Head of Creative Projects at Marlowe Theatre.
www.marlowetheatre.com