Editorial: Autumn Term 1 2020-21

Actually I loathe ‘Memory’, although some of the other songs in Cats are good fun – but something compelled me to write that there, and now that final repeated melodic phrase is firmly wedged between my ears for the rest of the day. It does, however, seem somehow an appropriate theme tune for the position in which many teachers find themselves as the new academic year begins: jaded, slightly helpless, but dogged and defiant. It's been an extraordinary year, but somehow all those students are going to get back to school and, with a host of new and complicating restrictions no doubt in place, we're all going to get on with it.

Lockdown was a peculiar experience at D&T HQ. With a much-reduced team (just me on the Editorial side, in fact, but members missing in all other departments too) we got our final summer issue out after a swift re-commission to tailor content to sudden online-learning, but we also managed somehow to launch our long-awaited new dedicated website, www.dramaandtheatre.co.uk – and I am so proud of it.

Content will increase as time goes on, and as staff return to work and are able to join in getting our full archive up online for you – but already the website features more than 500 distinct pages of content to browse: from news stories to performance and book reviews, from single-page lesson plans and practitioner guides to 10 or even 20-page schemes of work. If you've been a subscriber to D&T for only a short time, there is now somewhere you can go to access a huge archive of material of practical value in your drama studio (or if necessary, as we hope it won't be, on Zoom), under a variety of subscription packages.

And that wasn't the only new thing we launched in lockdown: as reports circulated about a host of things that people from all walks of life, of all ages and in all professions were doing to support their fellow man in unprecedentedly difficult times, we decided to create a platform to celebrate the performing arts teachers among their number. Those teachers, who have perhaps spent whole careers doling out gold stars to students who go above and beyond, were worthy we decided of gold stars themselves. And so we launched the #GoldStars campaign, which will culminate with an award at the Music & Drama Education Awards in London next March. To read more about #GoldStars, turn to page 10 – and please share your stories with us, we'd love to hear them.

Lest you should have released the Andrew Lloyd Webber earworm from your brain over the course of reading this editorial, I shall end with some more (slightly misquoted) TS Eliot, because while life might not be quite like it was any more, we must think of a new life, and we mustn't give in.