Lucy's blog

As Principal of a drama school, I'm asked this question a lot. And I could write a book on the many reasons why drama is so excellent - not just good - for children. But for this blog post, I'll focus on just one benefit; and that's the improvement drama can...

  It’s the end of the summer holidays and we are now extremely busy putting the final touches to our curriculum for Autumn Term 2014. When I set up Perform nearly 15 years ago, I wanted to create a drama school which was about the children having the best fun...

OK, I'm going to come clean. I have a guilty pleasure...and that's the new Disney cartoon Sofia the First. If you haven't seen it, it's a series about a young girl whose mother marries the King and therefore becomes Royal overnight. The episodes are based...

You'd have to have been living on Planet Mars recently not to have heard about Michael Gove's suggestion to have longer school days and shorter holidays and the negative reaction there has been to this. Mr Gove believes that our school system was designed for a...

I found a review on Mumsnet about Perform the other day. The Mum was waxing lyrical about us and how great our classes are. Her only one complaint was that our Safety Procedures were a little too strict and somewhat annoying. It transpired that the child's father (and...

I blogged about Christmas films last week and it made me think about the central role that television plays in the UK's Christmas Day celebrations. From the Queen's speech to countless Christmas specials and ,of course, classic Christmas Day films like The Wizard of...

My three year old daughter is a massive fan of classic musical films such as Annie, The Sound of Music and The Wizard of Oz. She likes nothing more than to curl up on the sofa and mouth along the words. Luckily, she has a Mum who is quite happy to sit and watch them with her...

A friend forwarded me a really interesting article by journalist Simon Kuper in the FT magazine recently. It tells the story of how, in Jamaica in the 1980s, a group of community health workers began to make weekly visits to babies whose growth had been stunted by infection...

Here at Perform, we often get contacted by casting directors asking if we can provide them children for auditions. They are generally surprised when we tell them that we that this is not something we do and we don't have a theatrical agency attached to our...

My son's starting Reception class in September, so the ?Tiger Mother? in me contacted the school to ask when he could start learning an instrument. Apparently, his school has a policy of not starting children until Year 2, so if I want him to begin learning before then,...