MDEA: Your time to shine

It's traditional for teachers who have won at the Music & Drama Education Awards to be invited back to judge the following year. In all the years of the awards, this opportunity has never yet been turned down by a teacher, and Gill Foster is no exception. Having won the Drama Inspiration Award 2020, for ‘a teacher who has made or continues to make a real and significant difference to the lives of their students’, Foster will now sit on the panel to join in judging all Drama categories in 2021.

I ask Foster what the career pathway was which led to her success: ‘I've had a bit of an unconventional pathway,’ she remarks, ‘I started offacting, and then moved into secondary teaching. Then I moved into FE and was head of a big performing arts department at a sixth form college. I left to go back into acting and creative practice, and then I got a part-time job as a lecturer at London South Bank University. That was ten years ago now. I arrived at the University to a tiny and rather chaotic course in drama. The last ten years have been spent restructuring it, building it and developing it into something that I think is really worthwhile and works for the students.