Since 2009, The Primary Shakespeare Company (PSC) has been sending theatre practitioners into London primary schools, investigating and performing Shakespeare’s plays and language with teachers and their pupils. Each year they choose a different Shakespeare play around which to centre their work, which spans a term and culminates in public performances during their Shakespeare Festivals. For 2020, PSC chose one of Shakespeare’s most popular plays – The Tempest.
On 23 March 2020, as the PSC was on the verge of sending out theatre directors to schools to bring the experience of Shakespeare’s plays into the classroom, the Prime Minister announced the whole country would go into lockdown.
The Primary Shakespeare Company had two choices. To cancel the popular Shakespearean workshops or to create an alternative solution to ensure no young person was left behind. PSC chose the latter and came up with a very clever and creative way to bring their brand of the Bard to primary school children by going online.
In April, the charity worked swiftly to adapt to the online world and came up with a learning programme called ‘Shakespeare at Home’ – a free virtual learning platform. It has now been streamed to thousands of parents, carers, teachers and students across the UK. With the experience of Shakespeare’s plays at its heart, this resource included more than 150 activities – games, films, arts and crafts – as well as lesson plans for teachers. The material for parents encompasses the full national curriculum (English, Maths, Science, History, Art, Geography, History, Music and PE).
PSC knew parents and carers would be concerned about how to keep their children entertained and engaged with the curriculum during lockdown. That’s why they took the programme they would have typically delivered in primary schools and adapted it to an entirely online and digital-friendly platform, which was essential to the survival of young people’s mental health.
The reaction to the Primary Shakespeare Company’s online resources was inspiring, with thousands of children across the world accessing the creative online platform. In the ten years they’ve been running, their work has engaged, inspired and motivated more than 30,000 children using the power of drama and arts in schools and now, thanks to lockdown, they have influenced a global audience of children.
With lockdown lifted and schools reopened, PSC have resumed their tours in schools. However, they are still providing online educational resources and courses to bring together hundreds of individual activities and educational resources along with easy-to-follow lesson plans for teachers and parents, making Shakespeare more accessible than ever before.