Can you believe it?
I was doing a six session Drama course with recovering drug addicts for Adult and Community Learning (I’ll not say where). The idea was to work with them to produce a short play. They wanted to do A Christmas Carol so, working with them, I produced a 30 minute version which we began to rehearse. We were half way through the rehearsals when I was inspected. It’s a few years since I last worked for ACL so I was top of the list for inspection.
The inspector came, sat at the back and watched the whole process. At the end she was very enthusiastic. “I loved that,” she said, “and the learners got so much out of it.” She then went on to say all sorts of nice things about the session, the response of the guys I was working with (I do hate that words “learners”: it’s bloody patronising) and the quality of the work they produced.
Although arrogant (and experienced) enough to believe that I do a good job, I was nonetheless relieved to hear that, but then my pleasure was rather spoilt by the next comment.
”I’ve given you a grade 2,” she said. “It would have been a grade 1 but you didn’t have a written lesson plan.”
“Could you have written a lesson plan for that session?” I asked.
”No,” she said.
“In any case,” I said, “it’s a poor lesson that doesn’t leave the plan behind in the first five minutes. You’ve got to respond to the way the group reacts.”
“Yes,” she agreed. “You know that and I know that, but I have to tick the boxes and if there’s not a tick in ‘Lesson Plan’ box, you can’t get a grade 1.”
I used to believe that teaching is an art, that the teacher (and it doesn’t matter whether it’s a primary or secondary school teacher, a teacher in a university or a drama school), knowing what (s)he intends the class to achieve in both the long and short term, presents the material in a way which is sensitive to the mood of the class as well as their abilities, adapts and changes the lesson to make the best impact in the situation with which (s)he is faced in the lesson, is ready to move off in a totally different direction if that is what it takes to achieve the long term aim - in short, is responsive to the needs of the class.
It appears I was wrong. Somone sitting in an office somewhere, possibly in Whitehall, has reduced a good lesson to a series of tick boxes and one size fits all.
The word “bollocks” springs to mind!
Sorry. It’s not theatre but if this is how the Learning and Skills Bollocks is trying to organise education - including drama education - then the outlook isn’t very healthy. Please, someone, tell me this bollocks hasn’t got into actor training. Please.