Show’s Over?

The school performance may be threatened by a target-driven culture, but it lets teachers and children celebrate progress of a different kind, says Jo Payne...

As teachers we are forever creating memories. When looking back on my primary years, my most vivid recollections are of school productions. I can still sing lines from the musical Yanomamo and like many I can tell you all 29 colours in Joseph’s Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat – in order.

But while productions have been, and still are, part of the make-up of primary education, I’ve spoken to colleagues across the country who say this is changing, that performances are being shunned in favour of more ‘rigorous’, ‘academic’ learning.

It’s not difficult to deduce why this is happening. Ofsted reports always comment on progress in English and maths and judgements seem almost entirely based on data from those subjects; school productions rarely get a look in. Why would a school put on a production if it’s not going to benefit SATs results or impress HMI? Why should staff go to all the effort of finding a script, sourcing costumes, auditioning students, and rehearsing in and out of school time if, on paper, it makes no real difference?

It’s a great shame. Though the benefits may not always be measurable, creative talents are brought to the fore and life skills learned and refined – as I discovered this year while putting on my first school production.

At the start of the project we made the decision to go off timetable for three weeks in order to prepare for the show. We taught no English and no maths and gave up our PPA time; we simply rehearsed, practised and prepared. Our intention was to show the children that what we were doing was of paramount importance.

One could be forgiven for thinking three weeks of almost non-stop rehearsals was an easy ride for the teachers, but our focus shifted from planning, teaching and assessing to timetabling, designing and creating. And though we learned to be producers, costumiers, and sound technicians, the real value was for the children.

In the build up to the performance we watched as the lead actors and actresses clearly grew in confidence and began to project their voices; some also learned technical musical vocabulary and skills. Hidden talents were unearthed, including physical comedy and brilliant accents, and we had the opportunity to share the employment opportunities offered by theatres.

While practising their comic pauses, children understood puns and jokes that had previously eluded them, and they changed their delivery to reflect this new understanding. They learned to encourage, empathise, communicate, rehearse, apologise, and forgive – all skills that will serve them well in the future.

Two timid boys, Billy and David, were put in charge of lights and sounds. After brief instructions about how the complex equipment worked, they were able to skilfully manage both responsibilities with ease. They defied all expectations, even choreographing a thunderstorm and making artistic use of the spotlight. These technological skills and talents just wouldn’t have been recognised in the English or maths classroom. The boys gained an identity within the year group from their role in the production and it gave them a sense of pride they’d not previously experienced.

Those without main parts learned the importance of patience as they sat through most rehearsals. They witnessed for themselves how the repetition of fairly trivial entrances and scene changes helped to improve the flow of the show – even making constructive suggestions to their peers on stage. Having watched the teaching team struggle to get set pieces and props on and off stage in an organised fashion, a small group of children offered to be stage hands. Although it was only few days before show time, they quickly blossomed in their new roles; making lists, writing timetables, assigning jobs and rehearsing their important, and sometimes fast, transitions.

As a team of children and adults, we worked incredibly hard to make the production a roaring success. I don’t know whether it would have earned us an ‘outstanding’ from our good friends at Ofsted, had they turned up – nor do I particularly care. But had we got ‘the call’, what would we have done? Drop everything and teach English and maths, or stand by our conviction that there’s no education like show education and continue as planned with our production? I fear it would have been the former. How sad.

About the author

Jo Payne is a KS2 class teacher at Vale First and Middle School in Sussex. You can read her teaching blog at MrsPTeach.com