Interview: Jacqui O'Hanlon Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC)'s director of creative learning and engagement

Jacqui O’Hanlon (JO): Absolutely. We have over 15 years of long-term partnership work with primary and secondary schools across England (funded by Arts Council England). Across all of that activity we kept seeing two key themes emerge from teacher-reported impact. The first was children's literacy, particularly speaking, listening and writing. Whenever teachers would do action-research or give feedback, we’d always be surprised by how much our pedagogy and Shakespeare's language had really made a significant difference to the kinds of language the children were using in speech and in their writing, or the kinds of expressiveness that non-verbal children were using. The other key theme we saw was about the change in children's academic self-concept. And by that I mean the way the child thought about themselves as a learner; their attitude to school.