Opinion with Sandra Allan

I was very excited to announce that AQA are adding four new diverse plays to our GCSE and A Level Drama specifications. But how did we get here?

At the end of last summer, we decided to give our students more choice by adding new plays to our GCSE and A Level Drama specifications, but we knew we needed the right help to make the right choices.

So, we brought together a community of drama subject associations, higher education, teachers, practitioners, expert advisers and industry to help us. Working with our specialist assessment design team, our senior examiners and Romana Flello and mezze eade from the London Theatre Consortium, we read through a range of diverse plays before making the final selection.

We wanted to ensure these new additions were engaging and exciting, and met the demands of our qualifications, and we're delighted with the four plays chosen. They offer rich opportunities for teachers and students to explore a diverse range of themes, and being able to study and perform characters that look like and reflect the experiences of students, raises self-esteem and aspiration. Each play offers something different, exciting and diverse for students:

• The Great Wave offers students the opportunity to explore a contemporary play with a completely Asian cast.
• The Empress is epic in scale, with moments of unknown British history revealed via an excellent story, songs, music, movement, words, creative design and fast-paced very theatrical action.
• The Convert considers questions of racial, political and religious identity and assimilation, exploring the cultural and religious collisions caused by British colonialism.
• Three Sisters explores hope, love and longing from the political perspective of soldiers, family and friends of the sisters while giving a vivid account of the Biafran civil war and the impact of British neo-colonialism.

These new plays will be available for first teaching this September, but just adding diverse plays to a qualification won't ensure greater diversity in the curriculum by itself. That's why we've also put together a range of support and resources to help drama teachers introduce the new plays, including specimen questions, the key social and historical backgrounds of each of the plays and free training which will cover topics such as stereotypes, accents and casting, as well as working with students’ own identities.

www.aqa.org.uk/subjects/drama