The Creative Space: Drama & Theatre Editor's Award Winner 2024

HF: Can you briefly describe what The Creative Space is?

HD: The Brays is a special day school in Birmingham for children aged 3-11. We have around 100 pupils with a wide range of special educational and physical needs. The Creative Space is our sensory drama studio where we run a weekly programme of immersive theatre workshops for all the children at the school. All the workshops involve activities for the children to engage with, that fit within the context of the half-termly theme. We use many of the conventions from a typical theatre, including lights, sound, costume and set, to create stimulating and wondrous environments for the children to explore.

HF: What kinds of activities do you run there?

HD: All of the activities are playful and take place in role as far as possible. Many involve choosing and problem solving, which may be different for primary aged children at a special school as opposed to in mainstream. We now have six themes a year which each run for half a term. Within each theme we devise five workshops that each run for a week, and there is a maximum of five or six children in each session plus staff.

HF: What tips or advice would you give to educators that are inspired by The Creative Space?

HD: People often ask where our ideas from and to be honest it's a long answer, but here are my main pieces of advice:

• Consider your sensory students first but have a range of options for every activity to accommodate all children.
• Document your work. I take photos every week both to show the teachers what's in the Space the following week, but also to remind ourselves how we built things previously. This saves loads of time.
• Build up a pool of resources and don't underestimate how much space they take. Storage is a real issue. At Brays we have things stashed all over the school, from outdoor sheds, to dedicated cupboards to ‘Narnia’ behind one of the classrooms.
• Recycle your resources, reuse them in different contexts. Simple wooden blocks can be skyscrapers in New York, part of an architect's model and so on.
• If you have the space, create a designated studio.
• Look at the staff around you and see who's good at what and who's into what. All children recognise when you're not engaged, and enjoying things on your own terms is really important.
• Creativity can be a hard thing to get your head around, until you provide children with the means to show you their likes, what they can do and what they're all about. Let them play and do things in their own way. Watch them and they'll let you know what works best for them.

All children recognise when you're not engaged, and enjoying things on your own terms is really important

HF: What was the response like from students? Were there any particular testimonies that have stayed with you?

HD: Children love playing and they learn through play. Many of our children don't speak, so they have to come up with other ways to communicate their feelings. Quite often they get very excited about going into the Space and are very reluctant to leave. They are also very good at voting with their feet and we quite often have unscheduled visitors coming to see what's going on. It is also common to see very definite changes in the children's behaviour in the Space. Typically they are very focused and probably able to sustain their concentration for longer than is normally seen. They can become very vocal as well, and we encourage this vocalisation with microphones and special effects.

HF: How can you imagine this project being replicated and adapted in other places across the UK?

HD: If you had sufficient motivation, you could replicate the Space in many schools. The particular model at Brays fits in with the smaller class sizes and the increased number of TAs typical of special schools, but you could adapt this. For example, we run CPD sessions for TAs every week where I demonstrate how to take individual activities from that week's workshop in the Space and develop them into a classroom activity. You don't have the fancy bells and whistles of lights and a four-meter shaduf, but the essence of each activity can be transferred. We use these as the basis for our CPD sessions each week, in a separate room, just using the bare bones of the idea with a few props.

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