Drama, which is a proven way of helping children develop confidence, concentration and all manner of social skills for their future lives, is still appallingly low on the National Curriculum’s agenda. One example of this is the fact that Drama is still being treated as part of English rather than a subject in its own right

Anyone who has experienced Drama classes themselves or seen their child transform during Drama, will know that the difference it makes cannot be underestimated. It really is high time that this was addressed by the Department for Education.

There have been numerous studies about the benefits of  Drama across all children and I have personally witnessed many of them. They include seeing our classes helping children to:

• improve self-confidence
• acquire better concentration and memory skills
• develop reading and writing skills
• boost self esteem
• build a colourful imagination
• work as part of a group
• follow directions and instructions
• encourage confident speaking
• develop a wider vocabulary
• recognise emotions in others
• identify their own emotions.

As information becomes more and more accessible and a potential employee’s “skillset” becomes more and more important, what could be a higher priority in the formative primary school years than to develop these skills? Equipped with these attributes, you are en route to achieving anything you set your mind to. And isn’t that really what our education system should be promoting?

That’s not to say that there isn’t any Drama at primary schools currently. For example, every day, dozens of our Perform teachers go into primary schools and run educational workshops based on topic such as The Great Fire of London and Florence Nightingale in which we teach the children historical facts by acting out the role of the baker who started the fire on Pudding Lane or a soldier in the Crimean war. Teachers always comment afterwards how much the children learn from actually being in history rather than being taught it. This is the power of drama to bring life, excitement and passion to the classroom- to ignite a flame of curiosity and a hunger for learning – as well as being a fantastic way to focus boistrous children and bring shy children out of their shells. Nothing has the power to do this like Drama.

So if you are reading this, Mr Gove, please think about how easy it would be to give every child the opportunity to feel alive, passionate and confident enough to fulfil their potential.  And make some room for Drama in the National Curriculum!

It is a fact universally acknowledged (thank you Jane Austen) that parenting is difficult. There’s no real training course, no previous experience and yet the risks if you get it wrong are serious and far-reaching. In particular, as parents, we are challenged with different situations to deal with almost every day.

I encountered just such a situation last week at my local soft play centre. It made me think about how far we should go in letting our children learn by their own mistakes.

As with most soft play centres, there’s a big slide (it always makes me think I’m in The Faraway Tree as I slide down it with my 2 year old) which is always a favourite with most of the children who attend. I’d noticed that there were two children a little bit older than mine hanging around the bottom of the slide and trying to walk up it. They had collided a few times with the kids sliding down resulting in one child running off in tears.

To cut a long story short, when we decided to slide down, I called down to the children and asked them to move out of the way as I didn’t want them or us to get hurt. The children did this immediately and all was well until the mum decided to address me at the bottom. She was in no way aggressive or rude but simply said that she would prefer if I didn’t tell her children what to do. I told her that I understood but that, as an adult, I couldn’t sit back (or slide down) in this case and bump into her children and hurt them. I said that I felt responsible for their safety as I am an adult and her children were under the age of 6. She responded by saying that “she preferred her children to make their own mistakes so that they learn from them”.

In some ways it’s a very admirable statement to make and obviously she wasn’t telling her 3 year old to cross a busy road without holding her hand. But my feelings are that there’s a clear definition of role between parent and child and a child shouldn’t necessarily need to hurt themselves in order to learn what’s right or wrong. What’s the matter with your mum telling you that something’s dangerous and if you continue to do it, you’ll hurt yourself and the other children? And dare I say it, is it not a bit irresponsible and lazy to allow your child to do whatever they want in a public place then justify it by saying that they will learn from their mistakes?

But then, maybe there’s a happy medium: let your child learn by their own mistakes as long as it doesn’t affect their safety and the safety of those around them. At Perform, we go on weekly improvisations where the children lead and make decisions about the dramatic situtuations we put them in. We might be climbing Mount Everest, jumping across crocodile heads or floating in Outer Space but it is the children who decide what happens along the way. Giving them the responsibility in a make-believe world is, in my opinion, very important and valuable for their development, but at the same time, it is safe and no harm can come to them.

I’d love to hear your views.

Because we now have quite a few schools, many people think that Perform is franchised like most other drama, dance and singing organisations. But we aren’t. Everything is centrally run and we are very specific about the sort of teacher who works for us – specifically, we only pick the  fabulous sort. Which is why I actually really enjoy the contracting part of my job, because it means that I get to talk to them all.

It’s not easy to get to be a Perform teacher. Simon Fielding (our Regional Partner) and I audition around sixty actors on the first Monday of every month. We ask them to prepare and play a drama game for us. If they get through that round, they have to learn and perform a dance routine, and if they get through the dance round, they have to sing a song and then have an interview with us.

We make no apology for the gruelling process we put them through. Not only do they have to be able to act, sing and dance, they also have to demonstrate that they’d be brilliant with children. We are normally left with about five people! X Factor is tame compared to Perform.

The successful people are invited to two days of training where they learn the Perform teaching style and, if they are successful, they watch workshops and then, with the support of an Area Partner, can start cover-teaching for us.  Obviously, all the normal CRB and reference checks are made too.

Part of the beauty of being centrally run and not a franchise is that we all have the same curriculum – so at the moment everyone is madly learning our Circus and Hercules Beat Resources for next term. Check out our Lion Tamer and Hercules Beat dance videos!

This means that, if any of our talented teachers get acting jobs (and they do), it’s not catastrophic as the person we put in their place will be equally brilliant and will also know exactly what to do in class because we all follow one programme. From the children’s point of view, yet another fun person comes to teach them.

You might see your Perform Teacher at class at 4pm and then on Eastenders at 7.30pm and, whilst we try as much as possible to keep consistency, I’d rather Perform children be taught by inspirational and talented actors who might get jobs because of their skills, than people who aren’t so special.  I’ve heard too many scary stories of am-dram loving retired bank managers buying theatre school franchises and that is not the way of Perform.

The big question that parents always ask me is “How do you get your teachers to be SO ENTHUSIASTIC”? And anyone who has ever been to a Perform class will agree that our teachers love what they are doing. After all, how could you not be enthusiastic when you are acting, singing, dancing and playing crazy games with a gorgeous group of children?

Sometimes actors have to do boring jobs when they are ‘resting’, so I think they feel privileged to be passing on their love of theatre to children – practising their own performing skills every day by singing, dancing and playing colourful characters in improvisations. Some use it as a time to practice their accents so, if you see a teacher playing an Irish character in class, you might find they have to use an Irish accent for an audition the following day!

However, their common bond is not only their talent and work ethic, it’s how much they love and enjoy working with children. They are passionate about helping children develop the Perform 4 Cs and this really shows in the classes.

As it is our end of term, I’m watching a different presentation  every afternoon at the moment. And I must confess, I’m not just proud of all the brilliant Perform children, I’m also thrilled at the most fantastically talented and caring teachers that teach them at Perform. A big thank you to you all.

And if you know anyone who might be an amazing Perform Teacher, please ask them to send us their CV. We’d love to hear from them.

I must admit that, as an August baby myself, I was slightly taken aback at the suggestion!  It’s also not something that I have ever worried about in all my years of working with young children. However, five minutes with Professor Google suggests that there is at least some science to support the theory.

In particular, my attention was drawn to a brand-new report from the Institute for Fiscal Studies which warns that summer babies are more than three times as likely to be considered ‘academically below-average’ by their teachers at age 7 than their autumn counterparts. Similarly, it has found some evidence to suggest that August children are up to 20% less likely to attend a top university. And this report is by no means a lone voice on the subject.
At first sight, the findings of this report are pretty shocking (particularly if your child happens to have been born in the summer months). However, before you start desperately calling up home tutors, here are a few thoughts:

Firstly, there are of course many examples of highly successful summer babies  - Sigmund Freud, Madonna, Rafael Nadal, Richard Branson, Paul McCartney, Judy Garland, Stephen Fry, Richard Attenborough and Sam Mendes - to name but a few.

Secondly, the suggestion of a child’s birth date as an infallible guide to their likely academic success looks pretty unconvincing when you examine the alternative proposition, namely that September babies are bound to be confident academic overachievers. I can think of many parents that simply wouldn’t recognise this characterisation.

The IFS report will be more grist to the mill for the various interest groups who are already lobbying to change the school system to remove the disadvantages of children who are young for their year. But, in the meantime, as a parent of a summer baby, what can you do?

In my experience, if you think there’s a risk that your child may find it difficult to keep pace with their classmates (particularly in the early years) or may struggle to assert their own personality in larger groups, you can devise specific strategies to help them. Try to arrange play dates with as many children of your own child’s ‘age’ as possible, encourage them to get involved in extracurricular activities in which they can excel and provide as much positive reassurance and feedback as possible when they do succeed. I hope that it goes without saying that this is precisely the type of activity and environment that we aim to foster a Perform, where each child is treated as an individual and encouraged to develop their confidence and interpersonal skills in a positive group environment.

Finally, I’ve always believed that the most important thing is not to become too fixated on the potential factors that may affect your child’s development. Certainly, it’s essential to avoid letting your child know you have any such concerns, whether expressly or tacitly. If you do, there’s a real risk that your worries may become a self-fulfilling prophecy.
Ultimately, research like the IFS report is no different to that which suggests different academic performance between boys and girls at certain ages or in personality type between first children and siblings. In a loving supportive environment, these factors should be neither advantages nor disadvantages. They are simply one small part of our child’s make-up.

So, what do you think? How important do you believe the month of your child’s birth is? Is researching and raising the profile of this potential ‘problem’ a good or a bad thing? More pertinently, how have you summer babies out there fared? Is this a genuine problem or a good example of already overburdened parents finding something new to worry out?

When the party entertainer saw that Tom wasn’t taking part, he came over and said  “Come on, Mr Shy Boy. Come and join in!” He walked away and I said to Tom, “Go on, Tom”. And Tom responded with “I can’t, Mummy, I’m shy”. Although I didn’t show it at the time, inside I was quite annoyed. Although well meaning, the flip comment that had just been made in front of my son was inaccurate and unhelpful and, while I don’t think Tom believed it about himself, it gave him a good reason not to join in.

I’ve always disliked the word “shy”. I much prefer to say that somebody lacks confidence because this suggests it is something that can be remedied unlike shyness which is perceived as a character trait. If somebody is labelled as shy, they’ll live up to it and remain so. My son does not lack confidence so I just ignored his temporary clinginess and he then joined in. But it did make me think about how careful we should be when we describe our children, and especially in front of them, because children really do listen.  If you describe your child as shy in front of them then they are very likely to continue being so. And if they aren’t shy and want to get out of an activity, it can also give them a good excuse!

When children come to Perform, they come for lots of different reasons. Many come to simply have fun through drama, dance and singing. But many children come because they lack confidence and our special games and exercises and the nurturing quality of the classes really help to develop a child’s confidence skills.

When a child comes to Perform for the first time, we always ask their parents to tell us about their personality but, crucially, this is always when the child is not present. It’s not unusual for a parent to tell you that their child is shy, but I think it is essential that the child doesn’t hear this. Once a child feels their personality has been “defined” in this way, it’s hard for them to believe they can change it. I also think we should avoid telling a child that they are “naughty”, “cheeky” etc. I think it’s better to say “that was naughty behaviour” or “what you did was naughty”, rather than “Dan, you are a really naughty boy”.

Does anyone else have experience of their child being labelled and them living up to it?

If I were a teenager today, I’d probably simply bbm/text my friend  “R u free Sat?”

There’s no doubt that the ability to communicate remotely has advanced hugely since I was young. However, while all this technology is extraordinarily clever and useful, does it mean that our children’s communication skills will lose out?
We recently ran a survey with 500 of our Perform parents and that’s exactly was one of the main findings. It seems that parents are concerned that their children’s social skills are not being developed because of online technology. In fact, parents’ main concerns were their children’s social confidence when meeting new people, their happiness and their ability to make friends. Interestingly, these ranked higher than those about their child’s academic ability and health.

I wasn’t especially surprised by this because it’s something that I hear every day from Perform parents. In fact, that’s why I set up Perform in the first place – because drama is the perfect way to help children improve their communication skills. But is the online era really to blame?

Certainly, all these new methods of communication don’t help the art of conversation. I find that I rarely speak to friends on the phone these days. It’s all bbm, texting, emailing and tweeting.  But while I have a sufficiently established set of social skills for this to have a minimal impact on me, children growing up today are not in the same position. The formative social development years of 4-12 will be very different for today’s children and, if they don’t tend to have face-to-face or even voice-to-voice communication, then surely the development of vital social skills such as eye contact and body language are going to suffer.

And it’s not just “real” interaction which is being affected. So is children’s ability to construct sentences when writing. I spoke to a Head Teacher the other day about this and she said that ‘text speak’ is very much apparent when children write these days. And emailing? There’s no real etiquette to email, so the more we use it, the more the art of letter-writing will be forgotten.

“Good riddance” you may say. “Etiquette, spelling and punctuation are simply methods people use to enforce differences in class and education. The substance of communication is the only thing that matters”.  You may have a point. However, few would dispute that face-to-face interaction and our confidence to be able to do it is crucial. After all, these are the skills that allow us to present ourselves to the outside world, the ones we use to ‘sell ourselves’ when we go for job interviews and the way we make friends and live our lives. They are, quite literally, the skills we need for a happy, balanced and fulfilling life and to see them slipping away is deeply worrying.

Clearly no one wants to go back to the days before online technology but will the gains in immediacy, connectivity and convenience be the demise of a more real richer and closer interaction?

I tweeted this idea yesterday and a cousin who I haven’t seen or spoken to for years tweeted back immediately with “Maybe, but it’s made us get back in touch after 10 years of no communication so is it such a bad thing?” I’d be interested to hear your thoughts.

She says that sometimes she has only one hour to get to know a child before they have a major procedure and that the best way to get to know them is to simply start playing with them straight away.  This enables her to make almost immediate decisions about their personality so she can work out how to support them in whatever they are about to go through.

Chatting to her made me think of my favourite quote -  “You can discover more about a person in an hour of play than in a year of conversation” (by Plato apparently). And wow, I really believe that. It’s basically the whole ethos behind Perform – our major emphasis is on play. We spend all our time playing drama, dance and singing based games with the children and, as teachers, this helps us to get to know them really quickly so we can get onto the useful business of helping them develop.

I was outside a class last week and one of our brilliant teachers stepped out to  prepare himself to enter in character as Boss the Head of the Monkey Village. Just before he went in, he said “Can you believe this is our job?” And I know just what he meant.  Sometimes you have to convince yourself that you are working when your job is spent jumping in and out of different characters, playing silly word games and singing songs at the top of your voice.

But, despite appearances,  it is serious fun and serious play and whilst it may seem like we are all “monkeying around” for an hour, we are able to really get to know a child and work out how to make a difference. By playing our now famous Toy Shop game, we can work out which children need to help with their focusing skills. With our Word in One game, we can see which children need their confidence building with solo-speaking exercises.

Parents often comment on the Feedback Forms written by Perform teachers for every child every ten weeks. One of the most frequent remarks is that it is more detailed than their end of term report from school – a pretty flattering considering we  spend a maximum of 90 minutes with the children each week. But, if Plato was right (and I think he was), it’s through play not conversation that we can get to the real heart and essence of our children.

So here’s to lots of playing and lots of serious fun. And here’s to using fun for all sorts of purposes. One of my favourites is the Mary Poppins purpose. Serious Fun was  the way that Mary Poppins got her charges to clean the nursery by making a boring activity a fun game. And if it’s good enough for Mary Poppins, it’s good enough for me.

This type of question always makes me blush a bit because, until I started Perform,  I had absolutely no business experience whatsoever! I studied drama at university and was a theatre actress performing mainly in musicals in the West End and on tour.  In between acting jobs, I would teach drama, dance and singing to young children.

Ridiculously, I didn’t even have an email address when I started Perform never mind anything resembling a business plan. If I’d gone on Dragons’ Den and had been asked questions about gross profit and turnover, I would have been one of those contestants who bow their heads and look embarrassed.

What I did have, however, was a belief that I could make a difference to children through the performing arts and a passion to do it. When I opened my first Perform class in 2000, I had spent years before that dreaming about having my own school. Working for other children’s drama schools gave me the experience to know what worked and what didn’t work. I was able to learn my craft when working for someone else and work out how I could make it better. I didn’t want to replicate the competition. I wanted to make something brand new; something fresh and different to what I had experienced as a child and to what I had observed as a teacher.

I had no kids of my own then and I think that enabled me to think out of the box a bit. It let me try something a bit different and be bold. For example, we’ve always allowed Perform children to sign up at any point throughout the term rather than being restricted to term starts like other organisations. This allows children who are overwhelmed at the start of a new school year to join at half-term once they have settled into school. I also wanted to run things centrally with a dedicated team producing specially written songs and scripts used across all classes (rather than another re-hash of Oliver!) and evaluating all the teachers so that we could ensure a consistently high  quality across every school – something which I know most franchise operations struggle with.

Finally and most importantly, I knew that what I wanted to do wasn’t being done properly by anyone else. Every other children’s drama school was paying lip-service to social skills and confidence then filling the classes with the rigorous drilling of  vocal exercises, “tap and modern”  etc. I wanted to put confidence, concentration, coordination and communication at the heart of every class so that the songs, games and exercises served the children rather than the other way around.

Running a  business is very hard work but also extremely rewarding when it goes well. As a result, lots of people are looking for a business idea all the time and there’s a huge selection of books, television programmes and internet sites dedicated to the subject. My own view is that you shouldn’t ever start a business unless you are obsessed and passionate about your product – it’s the thing that will keep you going when times are hard.

For example, when things aren’t going as well as planned, I still know that every child can benefit hugely from Perform whether they are painfully shy or extremely confident and this spurs me on. Drama is amazing for children; it gives them essential skills that will help them throughout life and I am a direct beneficiary of that having been a very shy child myself. My passion for that transformative process is the thing that drives me on to expand and grow my business and means that my lack of experience in other departments doesn’t matter so much.

If you want to start your own business, go for it! Don’t be put off by not having a business background or  experience – that can all be gained as you go along. But…only go for it if you love and adore what you will be doing and know that you are offering something better than anything else out there. Don’t do it if you think it is good – it has to be amazing. And be prepared to work harder than you’ve ever worked before.

After all, if you’re working at something you really believe in, it hardly ever feels like work!

It wasn’t like Jane’s parents didn’t try. They were regular visitors at her school throughout her primary years to try and see why their clever little girl was struggling so much with reading (she didn’t read until she was in Year 6). Unhelpfully, the school kept saying that she was just lazy -  something they knew their daughter was not.

Jane now looks back on her childhood and realises how difficult it was for her and her family and how much extra work she had to do to compensate.  She found reading so difficult that she had to become an expert at memorising and would learn whole chunks of text because she couldn’t read out loud. If she didn’t get the chance to memorise something, she’d make excuses in class to go to the loo or say she felt sick  – anything not to read out loud. If she couldn’t work out an excuse to not read, she’d try and work out which her bit would be and read it in her head continuously until it was her turn. What Jane needed and didn’t get was specialised help – of which there is now a lot more available.

People with dyslexia can learn to read, write and study effectively when they use methods specifically designed for their learning style. That’s why it is important to diagnose it as early as possible. Very simply, the earlier it is diagnosed, the better the outcome in terms of reading skills. More worryingly, failure to recognise dyslexia early enough can lead to children not realising their full academic potential.

So what are the symptoms of dyslexia and, as parents, what should we be looking out for?

• Poor reading compared to good general ability
• Slow to learn to speak; poor at rhyming; mispronouncing words; not noticing small differences between word sounds
• Letter and number reversals
• Letters appear to blur and move around and get in the wrong order
• Bizarre spelling, same word spelt several different ways on the same page; spelling learnt one day forgotten the next
• Slow at learning letters, letter sounds, alphabet, colours, days of week, months of year, multiplication tables
• Hatred of reading aloud
• Difficulty copying from blackboard
• Difficulty concentrating
• Poor coordination
• Confusing left and right
• Directions and thinking missequenced
• Family members experienced difficulty learning to read or spell when they were at school
• Tendency to allergies, eczema, asthma etc.

Albert Einstein, Leonardo da Vinci, Richard Branson, Winston Churchill, George Washington and Hans Christian Anderson were all dyslexic. In fact, if you do an internet search for ‘famous people with dyslexia’ you will see a very long list of amazingly successful  people.

These days,schools aim to diagnose children early on so that correct learning techniques can be applied immediately. Hopefully, this means that, in the vast majority of cases,  they are saved from being humiliated, embarrassed and held back like Jane.

For more information about Dyslexia, its symptoms and treatment, visit Dyslexia Action, the biggest dyslexia charity in the UK.   If you have any help or advice, please do leave comments below.

Does that sound familiar to you? Have you ever said it to your own child? I know I have!

I’ve always been passionate about helping children make eye contact, especially when they meet new people or talk to adults. I think it is such an important skill to have. You only have to do an internet search for “Looking people in the eye” and you’ll find hundreds of pages about how hard people find eye contact. There are forums and websites completely dedicated to the subject so it is obviously a big problem out there.

Closer to home, eye contact is something we get asked about frequently when we talk to parents whose children come to Perform. Looking into someone’s eyes when you talk to them demonstrates confidence and we all want our children to be confident and to show this to the outside world. Eye contact is crucial for good communication skills and, if taught early, it can be with you for life.

Because of this, a big part of the Listen, Speak & Sing section at Perform is focused on developing eye contact skills. However,  of course the last thing you want to say to a child is “Today we are going to look at how to develop your eye contact skills”. You can imagine how well that would go down! What we try to do with all our games and exercises is to ensure that  the children learn what we want them to learn but also make it such fun that they think they are playing the most brilliant game ever. We spend about 3-5 minutes each week on a different eye contact game and it definitely works because the feedback we get from parents is always so positive.

So here’s just such a game for any parent or teacher who feels that their child or class needs to improve their eye contact. Normally, I make up the Perform games but this one was devised in class by Jamie, one of our teachers, about 8 years ago and it has been a hit ever since.

At Perform, we play it in a large circle as there are lots of us but I do it at home with my husband and two children and it works really well too. Try experimenting with different voices for the pizza and monkey voices as it really makes them laugh.

Hey! You smell like a Pizza

• Sitting in a circle, tell the children that you want to have a chat with one particular child and select them.

• Start chatting, but don’t give the child any eye contact

• Ask the children what you were doing wrong. Establish that you weren’t looking into their eyes and how important that is when talking to someone

• Tell them that you are going to test them

• Say to the child next to you in a loud voice while giving them perfect eye contact “Hey! You smell like a pizza!”

• Ask the child to look back at you and say “Oh, you cheeky monkey”

• Go around the circle until each child has had a turn. Make sure that each makes good eye contact before you move on

I hope you have fun playing it. Let me know your thoughts via the comments.