Drama at Grateley House School offers students valuable access to an engaging and broad range of creative stimuli to inspire and generate creativity in young people of mixed age, ability and culture in collaboration with the British Values, which are very much imbedded into the school’s ethos.

Our vision at Grateley House School is to offer a bespoke, enriching Drama experience for our young people, whilst ensuring the offer is both stimulating and challenging in a way that students can feel a sense of personal growth and development through the activities, group rehearsals and performances. It is felt universally across the school that the Arts is an essential part of helping our young people to understand much needed social, emotional and developmental skills in order to develop and enrich their personal communication and social interaction skills through an expressive platform such as Drama.

Students are given a much-needed opportunities to learn team/ group working skills as part of the creative process. This can include, but not limited to social interaction, confidence building and emotional expression.

We believe that Drama offers a much-needed opportunity to help our students with learning, emotional and behaviour difficulties to find alternate ways to learn, explore and develop their social communication and interaction skills in a safe, measured and consistent setting. This, alongside students receiving constructive feedback on practical and theory work and expected to understand and track their own areas for development, whilst celebrating personal success, and in turn building their self-esteem and resilience skills.

In Key Stage 3 students are introduced to Drama, its forms and genre. This will include introductions to the basic theatre terminologies, including staging and roles in professional theatre. They will begin exploring Freeze Framing, Mime, and then build on to more complex tasks such as, Creating a Character, through the use of Improvisation and Hot Seating workshops. Students will also have an exciting, varied selection of plays scripts to explore in the unit, “Page to Stage.” During this unit, students will work in groups of 2 or more, where they will learn about blocking and responding to direction.By the end of KS3, students will deliver a performance consolidating their learning, resulting in a rewarding and satisfying sharing of work. Students will complete a written or group verbal to teacher scribed written evaluation) depending on ability.

In Key Stage 4 Students are given a far more in-depth programme of study that revisits skills and knowledge previously learnt in KS3, whilst stretching and challenging with more complex task, including giving the students more ownership of their own learning, and tracking their personal learning targets.

Students will have the exciting opportunity to enrol on the AQA GCSE Drama course, where they will complete a two-year course. During this time, students will develop their creative skills through a Devised Theatre Unit (Component 2) and have creative licence to create a piece of group, or solo Drama based on their choice of Stimuli. This is a very enriching and rewarding unit for students, which also offers regular self-reflection through a Devised Log, which is submitted at the end of the course and attributes their final assessment grade.

The vast of the course is Understanding Drama (Component 1) In this unit, students will select 1 set play from a choice of 6 pre-determined texts. Students will develop their analytical skills through a detailed study of the play, the plot, key themes and characters. This knowledge will inform the final exam at the end of the course.

During the examination, students will be specifically focusing on the Performance Skills, with a specific and detailed focus on how Actors use their Physical and Vocal skills to interoperate character emotion and importantly, how these impact on an audience. Classes are designed to help students focus on these skills, the choices a performer makes and their impact throughout the course.

Impact is very much at the centre of our Drama rationale. Frequently referred to from the perspective of the performer’s impact on the audience, we equally like to look at the impact the Drama offer has on our students. Impact is frequently evaluated by subject leads, ensuring the appropriate adjustments are made to fit the varying needs of our pupil’s complex, and bespoke behaviour support plans.

Staff deliver Drama at GHS with the upmost energy and enthusiasm. As an experienced, fully trained performer and teacher, it is a privilege to work with young people and help, and nurture personal growth and development through such an effective platform. Students get so much out of Drama from both a subject perspective, and from a whole school perspective with frequent links to cross curricular learning, including shared projects with English, Art and DT.