This issue of Drama & Theatre represents a significant milestone: it's the 100th issue to land on drama teachers’ doorsteps since the first landscape-oriented, ring-bound copy of Teaching Drama arrived at the beginning of the Autumn term in 2005.
To mark the occasion, we've gone back to the archives and selected some features to reprint from very early issues of Teaching Drama–you can read those on the next couple of pages, and no doubt they will prompt a variety of emotions, perhaps including nostalgia, amusement, and even horror!
As editor of the magazine since May 2012, I've followed developments and setbacks in Drama education for a decade, but most of our regular contributors have been on the front line for many years longer than that. I asked some of those experienced, inspiring, long-suffering Drama teachers to share their thoughts with me about what has changed, and what hasn't, in 16 years of Drama.
Two scourges
‘I've been teaching Drama for over 30 years and I have seen a lot of changes,’ Ali Warren told me. ‘The worst two have been the introduction of the EBacc, which has compromised the opportunities for young people to access a wider and appropriate (for them) curriculum; and the constant changes to the inspection process, which has the majority of head teachers increasingly concerned about how their school measures up to some arbitrary targets, rather than considering what is on offer for the students under their care.’
These were common themes among the teachers I spoke to. Agreeing that ‘the Ebacc is massively damaging to Drama by omission,’ Patrice Baldwin echoed Warren's frustration regarding the consideration of Drama in school inspections: ‘As a local authority arts and school improvement adviser from 2000-2011, I had to train as an Ofsted inspector,’ she told me. ‘By law, Drama was part of English, but it was not even mentioned in my Ofsted training to inspect English in primary schools.
‘I pointed out that Drama was legally required by the English national curriculum, but we did not ask questions about whether it was being provided, and were not trained to inspect it. I suggested that there needed to be at least one sentence in every Ofsted report that reported on Drama – but when I mentioned this to the Ofsted trainer, I was told that I might want to make Drama “my own particular hobby-horse”!’
Misdirected agendas
The sad fact is that the direction of development as far as official, and in particular government-level support for Drama is concerned, has been very decidedly downhill. Beginning from the introduction of the National Curriculum in 1988, Patrice Baldwin reels off a list of organisations and initiatives which have disappointed in their apparent aims to support the subject in education:
‘I feel Arts Council England is mainly industry driven, rather than learning driven – once their foot is in the school door, the emphasis shifts towards industry,’ she tells me. ‘The emphasis of Artsmark has also changed over time. It is good to get schools to review their arts provision and teaching, however, it increasingly seems to be tilted more to serve the purposes and economic needs of ACE and the arts industries (getting artists in and working with the creative industries), rather than ensuring and supporting consistent, high-quality arts teaching and provision in schools by qualified teachers.
Meanwhile, ‘Creative Partnerships,’ she goes on, ‘started out with so much promise, cost millions, and delivered some good projects, but does not seem to have left a lasting legacy. It was setting up an infrastructure but that has disintegrated.’
Ali Warren talked to me about her ‘dismay’ regarding the support for the Arts from government. ‘Their approach has been short sighted,’ she said, ‘School leadership has been given a level of independence which allows them to make decisions about their school curriculum such that if they don't understand it, it can be sidelined. I have been blessed with supportive SLTs, but I know this is not universal.
‘One of the good things over the last few years,’ she remarks, however, ‘is that theatres are beginning to understand the issues facing educators, and becoming more supportive. But there is still some way to go, and certainly our largest national institutions need to consider that they can be geographically limited – and in a Zoom world they could review that.’
Every cloud…
So Drama has been beleaguered in these years – and the teachers who remember better days are all the more frustrated by the chipping away which has been done at the subject by successive governments. But there is another, much more positive common theme in my discussions: ‘The kids are, as ever, great,’ says Ali Warren, ‘[They] still surprise and delight me.’
Alicia Pope writes to me about how students have changed for the better over the years: ‘Drama students have always been bold, but students are much more open to accepting the differences others, and their knowledge of other people has increased, meaning that their portrayal of others is less caricatured than it might have been in the past. And as things in society have changed in terms of mental health, students’ exploration of this topic is seen as a tool for support, and they often want their portrayal to be accurate and sensitive rather than generalised.’
And ‘Parents,’ too, she says, ‘see the importance of Drama as much as ever – especially with increasing external pressures on young people.’
In the light of our discussions, the first archive article I've decided to share, from 2007, is a piece about preparing for an Ofsted visit. If you've recently undergone one, I invite you to contemplate the ways in which Clive Hulme's thoughts speak to your own experience. Perhaps there are some things that never change. I hope, however, that Health & Safety has improved a little since the horror stories reported by Tony Gears in our second archive article…
