We believe that Drama has an important role to play as part of a wide and varied curriculum that prepares students for life in and beyond Westfield School. We aim each day to provide students with experiences in which they feel challenged and supported and aim for all students to leave lessons with a sense of pride and achievement.

Our focus at both Key Stages begins with high quality lessons which focus around a wide variety of skills, devices, styles and genres of theatre. Students will also participate in performances from published texts. As part of each one of these lessons students are also building a portfolio of personal and interpersonal skills and looking at themes and issues as a vehicle to create performance work. We also seek to offer students a variety of opportunities to extend their learning and achievement beyond the classroom.

We have three main aims:

• To provide students with the personal and transferable skills they will need to be successful, no matter what they go on to do, such as confidence, creativity, communication and team work.
• To provide a broad and indepth knowledge of drama and theatre, allowing students to achieve highly at GCSE and giving them a strong platform if they wish to study Drama further.
• To explore a range of social, moral and cultural themes and issues prevalent in today’s society.

Programme of Study

Students are baseline tested on their ability in the following areas: Creating, Performing and Evaluating.
Skills are then developed in the three areas:

• Creating: students will learn basic skills and techniques through individual skills lessons. Students will improvise as part of a group in devised performances. Students will study the background of stimuli and how this can influence their work. Students will use ideas and skills learnt to create drama.
• Performing: students will explore styles and themes through scripted work- Our Day out, Bugsy Malone and short script extracts.  Students will explore staging and performance techniques and apply performance skills.
• Evaluating: students will reflect and evaluate their own performance and that of others.

 

Suggested Reading List

• Trestle theatre - http://www.trestle.org.uk/
• Performance skills - http://www.bbc.co.uk/education/topics/zqwj6sg
• Bugsy Malone play script By Alan Parker.
• Little Red Riding Hood and the Wolf. Roald Dahl Revolting Rhymes.