A New School Theatre Company Has Launched in Shrewsbury

Transcript

00:00So I'm Liberty Griffin, I'm the Head of Drama at Pressfeld School.

00:04You're here today because we are two days away, or a day away,

00:09from launching our Pressfeld Theatre Company.

00:12It's a bunch of Year 7 students who've been working together

00:16since October on their first piece of theatre.

00:21So they've created everything themselves, they've decided the theme, the

00:24characters, they've written stories, monologues, songs, a guitar

00:29piece. Everything has been created by them and

00:32I've just sort of very gently nudged them

00:34when they've needed a bit of support. Interestingly, although we've been going

00:38since October, they've only done this in three days.

00:41So they had a day in October, a day in November,

00:44and today to create about a 16 minute piece.

00:51So it was created as part of Pressfeld Centenary Strategy

00:54and so we're really looking at our community partnerships and

00:58the ways that we can work with other schools, and as a drama teacher for me

01:02that always involves performing, and so I wanted to create a piece of

01:07work that was created by the pupils but that was for

01:11other pupils. So what I did is I looked at the Key

01:14Stage 2 PSHE curriculum, plucked out a couple of those themes

01:19and very gently nudged pupils towards picking one of them.

01:23So the piece that they've created is about cyberbullying,

01:26which we know is a really big hot topic at the moment, there's lots of themes of

01:29mental health, and so a lot of the pupils come in to

01:32watch. It's specifically targeted for their age group

01:36as a PSHE focus. For our pupils it's given them experience of

01:42decision making, directing, writing, they've been able to say yes,

01:48they've been able to say no, they've voted, they've collaborated

01:52in a completely different way than what we have time for in lessons.

01:55We have 40 minute lessons so it's a very

01:58short, sharp project a lot of the time, but

02:02the ownership is completely different. They've written introductions,

02:06they've taken complete ownership of every aspect of it, even down to one of

02:12our pupils 3D printed prop phones for us.