Drama
Intent
At Hareside Primary School we believe access to regular drama lessons allows children to build their communication skills, boost self-confidence, and deepen their understanding of stories and emotions through creative play and performance.
Our Key Intentions for Drama are to develop:
- Oracy and Confidence: Developing clear speaking, active listening, and the courage to share ideas or perform in front of peers.
- Cross-Curricular Learning: Bringing literacy, history, and fairy tales to life by letting students step physically into different characters, eras, and perspectives.
- Collaboration and Empathy: Fostering teamwork, turn-taking, respect for others' ideas, and an emotional connection to how other people feel.
- Creative Problem-Solving: Using physical expression, role-play, mime, and improvisation to explore complex scenarios and spatial awareness.
National Curriculum Requirements for Primary Drama:
- Spoken Language (Statutory): Across key stages 1 and 2, pupils must be enabled to participate in and gain knowledge, skills, and understanding associated with drama.
- Role play and Improvisation: Children should be taught to adopt, create, and sustain a range of roles, responding appropriately to others in role through improvisation and devising.
- Script and Performance: Pupils are expected to rehearse, refine, share, and respond thoughtfully to drama, poetry, and script performances for various audiences.
- Supporting Literacy: Drama techniques are formally recommended to help pupils explore characters, order ideas for writing, and improve reading comprehension.
Implementation
Our primary drama curriculum is designed to ignite imagination, build self confidence and develop essential communication skills across all year groups. By utilizing a dedicated drama specialist, we ensure high quality expert led instruction that empowers pupils to express themselves creatively, collaborate effectively and explore diverse perspectives through performance. Every year group participates in a dedicated 6 week drama block annually ensuring a progressive structured and age appropriate journey from Early Years to Upper KS2.
Enrichment and inclusion go beyond the core blocks. Drama provision extends to inclusive lunchtime clubs and targeted core group intervention sessions supporting both personal development and specialised learning needs. Celebration of performance and learning is brought to life during regular show cases during half termly assemblies giving children the opportunity to perform, build public speaking confidence and share their creative work with the wider school community. Yearly Christmas Performances provide the opportunity to showcase skills to parents and the community.
Impact
The impact of our drama curriculum focuses on confidence, engagement and collaborative skills. This will result on following key outcomes from pupils:
Increased performance confidence and resilience. Children will feel more confident when speaking in front of their peers. The supportive environment of the drama sessions successfully reduce anxiety around presentation and peer judgement.
- High engagement and enjoyment. The sessions achieve exceptional levels of student engagement, children thoroughly enjoy the activities which foster a positive attitude toward learning and active participation.
- Enhanced collaboration skills. Children improve their ability to work as a team. The collaborative nature of the drama activities encourage negotiation, active listening and collective problem solving.
- Empathy and social skills. Acting out different perspective teaches teamwork, mutual respect, and a deeper understanding of human feelings.
- Communication and Oracy. Children develop strong verbal listening skills, improving sentence structure and vocabulary.
- Cross-curricular learning. Drama brings abstract concepts to life, helping children explore historical events, ethical dilemmas and literacy texts more deeply.