Years ago, when I first started Mini Ps,  I spent a few minutes of each class on baby signing. After a while, I started to realise that the children who were most proficient in signing were often those who were least advanced in speaking.  The crunch came when one of the Mums said to me that she’d much prefer me to be accelerating her child’s speech through vocal exercises than trying to teach her child alternative means of communication. I did some more research, compared it with my own experience and dropped it from the curriculum.

The idea behind baby signing is that it helps parents to understand their needs before they can speak for themselves. So, if a baby is hungry, they make a sign for milk etc. And, in fairness, that does sound like a good idea because our control over our hands develops well before our ability to speak.

But what can happen is that children who sign become so used to using sign to express themselves that they don’t feel the need to talk and therefore their speech develops much later.

Baby signers claim that you no longer need to guess if your child is hungry, hot, cold or has a wet nappy, but my experience is that most parents can tell their children’s needs at that age anyway – if only by the tone of their cries.

Yesterday, one of our teachers, who is also a part time nanny for an 18 month old girl, came to speak to me. She and the parents are really concerned because the little girl doesn’t have any words at all. Ultimately, children all develop at different times, so I reassured her that this wasn’t a cause for concern, but my first question was “Does she sign?” And the answer was “Yes, really well”.

Despite our online age of texting, tweeting and emailing, speaking is still our main form of communication and we should be nurturing this from an early age. As a result, I’m not a fan of anything that delays or impairs the ability or desire to speak in children.

That said, any class that gets children together with their parents is always a good thing. I’d be really keen to hear your thoughts. And feel free to disagree!

In many ways, she was right. It is continual challenge to keep recruiting brilliant people and over the years we have experimented with different ways of finding our teachers. Nevertheless, the one thing I am resolute about is to use working professional actor-singer-dancers as Perform Teachers. We’ve tried qualified school teachers, child psychologists and those with childcare qualifications but realised quite quickly that it is only actors who have trained in the performing arts and worked in “the business” who have the skills and energy to deliver Perform classes.

Of course, it’s unusual to recruit actors who are actively focused on finding other work. However,  dynamism and passion is at the heart of the way we communicate with children and using professional performers is best for our method of teaching. Yes, they might go off to do a commercial and miss a week, but using the most talented people available means that the children will be equally inspired and motivated by the other teacher who stands in for them that day. The challenge is finding and training the very best and never ever settling for second-best.

With almost 200 schools currently across London and the South-East extending as far out as Oxford, Cambridge, Hove and Tunbridge Wells and around 20-30 new schools opening every January, April and September, this is a BIG challenge!  Next year, we’ll be opening in Bath, Bristol, Cardiff and environs  – our first big push outside London and the South-East – and of course these areas are even harder to recruit in as most actors are based in London.

So, my focus is now on recruiting fantastic new actors. I’m looking for ‘triple threats’ (people who are great at acting, singing and dancing), those who love children and want a stimulating and rewarding job in between their acting work. We provide a full training and, because we work after-school time and at weekends, attending meetings and auditions is never a problem.

We run auditions every month in Central London so, if you have any suitable friends, please do spread the word and ask them to send their CV and photo to recruitment@perform.org.uk. I’d love to hear from them.

Spot the Perform child

Two years ago, I offered my friend a free place at Perform for her son who had just turned 4 years old.  She thanked me but declined saying “He’s not a performing sort of a boy but I’m sure his sister will enjoy it when she’s old enough, she’s really confident and we’d love to bring her”.

It was interesting because my friend obviously had the wrong idea about Perform. She thought that we were a stage school which usually have a huge number of girls compared to boys.  They teach performing arts skills like dance step knowledge and singing ability. Who’s going to audition for Matilda? Who can do a triple time step? Who wants to appear in the next Milky Bar TV ad?

But in fact, what drives these traditional “drama schools” is the complete opposite to what Perform’s all about and I designed it like this for three reasons.

1. I’d gone to a very good but very competitive dance school in Wales when I was growing up. Although the atmosphere was great for some children (Catherine Zeta Jones was in the class above me), I think it actually took away my confidence as I always felt inadequate if I couldn’t get the steps right. My view is that confidence and social skills are best nurtured in an non-competitive, safe environment.

2. I wanted to offer classes  for all children – not just “stagey” types. And, in particular, I wanted to attract boys as much as girls. It’s a great shame that boys often don’t get exposure to drama and dance because parents think it’s “girly”.  Uniquely, Perform classes have equal numbers of boy and girls and I’ve been focused on achieving this through the content of what we teach and through the style our teachers have.

3. There are dozens of franchised theatre schools out there which aim to be a sort of “mini RADA”. They often have their own agency (that you have to pay to be in) and sometimes offer “the chance to appear in a  production on the West End Stage”.  London didn’t need any more and I wanted Perform to be different.

Above all, I wanted any and every child (regardless of whether they are labelled as “talented”) to have the experience of using their voices, their bodies and their imaginations in new and exciting ways as they grew up.  I wanted them to go on improvisations, sing their hearts out (in tune or not), project their voices to an audience and use drama to inhabit roles and to understand themselves and the world around them.

I think we’re on the right track and, although there’s always more work to be done, I’m thrilled with what my brilliant team of teachers achieve every week.

But back to my friend…a year after our conversation, she called me saying that her son had done one of our workshops at school, loved it and was desperate to join up. A year on, he’s definitely very much a Perform child but then, in my view, he always was!

Mermaids & Pirates - we're putting the finishing touches to next terms' theme

It’s the Easter holidays and I’m often asked if this is a nice quiet time for me at Perform. Well, it’s definitely quiet in the sense that we only have our holiday workshops running and not our normal workshops, but actually the holidays are probably my busiest time of the year because this is the time when we get a chance to plan for the following term and make sure that everyone’s clued-up and ready to go.

I’ve always been determined to keep Perform centrally run and not to expand by franchising not least because I don’t want to spend my time selling the idea of an  “easy flexible part-time income” to potential franchisees. I’d much rather spend it finding new ways to help shy children be more confident, boisterous children be more focused and get all children having fun and making friends.

From my point of view, that means working with our wonderful Area Partners honing our curriculum and training our teachers how to put it into practice. And as you can imagine, with over 200 venues and 200 teachers, this takes up quite a bit of time so the holidays are the ideal time.

Currently we are perfecting the Mermaids & Pirates (for 4-8s) and Bluebeard’s Bride (for 8-12s) themes, learning the songs and making sure that the actions for the poems are all learnt and suitable for the teachers. The Area Partners record them and then all the teachers have the holidays to learn everything ready for a huge rehearsal on April 15th when we all get together (about 200 of us) and make sure that everyone is up to speed and ready to teach. It’s an exhausting day, as you can imagine!

It’s not only important to get everyone together for the creative resources, but also to go through any important safety guidelines. There are CRBs to check, risk assessments to do, training in child protection procedures and all the other  vitally important apparatus which has to come first. After all, we are looking after the most important people in parents’ lives and we take that responsibility very seriously. There’s always room for improvement.

Next Sunday, we’ll be rehearsing “The Coconut Calypso” – so I thought you might like a little peek of what your children will be learning next term – click the image below to view.

Happy Easter everyone x

I guess, as parents, that’s our job. We worry about our children’s well-being and happiness so it’s only natural to show our love and care by looking out for potential problems and “measuring” them against benchmarks.

Having said that, maybe we should relax a little?

Last week, I was chatting to a Head Teacher who told me about a very stressed mother who was worried that her daughter (5 and a half years old) wasn’t reading as well as her classmates. The mother was suggesting that she cut down on her daughter’s after-school clubs to do more reading practice with her and focus on getting her to be “as good as her friends”.

The Head Teacher (who has years of experience and four children of her own) said very simply “At this age we should be developing the child as a whole and not just focusing on one aspect” and I wholeheartedly agree with this. We get so stressed with wanting to see achievement at an early age (even down when they can sit and crawl (!)) that we can easily forget that children develop at different ages and that’s completely normal.

For example,  do we teach children to read too young in the UK? According to Professor Katz, an American Education Professor, the UK model of teaching children in pre-school and Reception can actually be damaging. She claims that children shouldn’t even be introduced to the alphabet before they are five and a half years old.

Katz advocates that vocabulary should be learnt in context as opposed to on paper and recommends that play and creativity is the key. She defends this more informal approach by quoting  evidence that shows that, although early readers do well in tests initially, at 11 or 12, they are no better (and often worse) than children who had a later start at reading.

I’m sure that statistics can be found for and against early reading and academic pre-school focus and, of course,  it is human instinct to want to see your child achieve things early, if only to allay our own fears of slippage later on. But I firmly believe that  the main aim for every young child should be to nurture their happiness, confidence, and creativity and as the Head Teacher said “develop the child as a whole”.

Looking back at my own children, my son walked at 11 months and my daughter at 18 months but they both walk, run, skip and jump now. So did it matter that one walked quite early and one walked quite late? I think not. And, parental anxiety aside,  isn’t this the same for all child development?

I’d love to hear your thoughts.

As you might expect, this is something that we are passionate about at Perform. In fact, the central section of each workshop is called Listen, Speak & Sing and we focus entirely on helping children with their listening and speaking skills through fun exercises where they learn to project their voices, use eye contact when they speak and be confident when talking whether to one person or to an audience. I sincerely believe that if you teach a child skills such as how to project and talk in front of an audience at the age of 4, they will retain these for life – it is quite simply all about practice and repetition.

So, I was very excited to read about Hello which is a campaign to “increase understanding of how important it is for children and young people to develop good communication skills”. This phrase is music to my ears of course because it’s focusing on something that I spend so much of my time talking about.

According to the Hello Campaign, over one million children have some form of speech, language and communication need and these are only the children with issues that we know about. It aims to make communication a priority in homes so that children can fulfil their potential in school and in life. The campaign has monthly themes. For example, “Early chatter matters – from bump to birth and beyond”, where the focus is on how babbling babies don’t turn into talkative toddlers by chance. It requires help and encouragement from us.

Have a look at the well-resourced  website and see what you think. And, if helping your children’s communication skills is a particular interest of yours, here’s a quick and simple communication game we use at Perform that you can play at home or in the car.

Explain that you want each of your children to do the following:
1. Start by saying hello in a confident voice.
2. Say their name and age.
3. Say what their favourite fruit/colour/food/toy/book  is and why (pick just one for each round).

An example response might be  “Hello, my name’s Tom and I’m 4 years old. My favourite fruit is an orange because it is full of vitamin C”.

Once everyone has a turn, then repeat doing it again in a more confident voice or by changing the subject.

Playing this sort of simple game regularly and continually reinforcing the rules – that we must speak clearly with a nice strong voice and look at the people we are talking to – can really boost a children’s communication and confidence.

Have a go with your children and let me know how you get on.

1) Christmas Day
2) My birthday
3) St David’s Day

The first two are  obvious of course –  they involve presents! But the third, St David’s day, might surprise you.

For those who don’t know, St David’s Day is is the feast day of the patron saint of Wales and every year on March 1st,  we celebrate. I think one of the reasons the day even now gives me a shiver of pleasure is that, as a Welsh child, it was a half-day at school. The afternoon was spent visiting older relatives to show them what we looked like in our Welsh costume followed by singing a song for them.

Girls traditionally wear a heavy flannel skirt in dark red, blue, black and white, a shawl, an apron, a daffodil and a welsh hat (known in the area that I come from as a ‘cockle hat’). Boys normally just wear a leek pinned to their shirt. My daughter, Elizabeth, is demonstrating a Welsh costume in the photo.

You didn’t really get any material gifts from the day (apart from delicious Welsh cakes), but what you did get was to see lots of family and that’s something that I remember really loving.

I left Wales 20 years ago but most of my family still live in Swansea so, even though I married an Englishman and both my children were born in London, I really like to make St David’s Day a big deal in my household. My children both wear their Welsh costumes just as I did. I haven’t dared ask to take my son home from school at 12pm but I did send in toy leeks and daffodils for him to give to his (probably rather confused)  friends. And of course, this Sunday, my extended family are all invited for a traditional St David’s Day lunch so that the children can show off to their relatives as I remember doing so long ago.

It doesn’t matter if it’s a national special occasion, a family birthday or just an excuse to just get the families together, it’s always a wonderful learning experience for children to spend time with different generations and celebrate. What’s more, I hope that these events are something that they’ll remember forever.

Happy St David’s Day, everyone!

I’m always a bit sceptical about reading this type of book but I have to say that it has completely hooked me and I am now trying to bring out my own ‘french mummy’ with my kids.

Pamela Druckman moves from New York to Paris to be with her English boyfriend who is working there. They marry, have a child and immerse themselves in Parisian family life. But, after being a mother for a while, she starts to compare her own American/British techniques with the French mums around her and wonders why, amongst many other things, “French children don’t throw food”.

And it's not just mealtime behaviour, there are other differences as well. For example, French babies normally sleep through the night from 3 months. This isn’t because the mums are devoted Baby Whisperers or Gina Ford Evangelists. It’s all about what Pamela calls “The Pause” which means that, if your newborn cries at night, leave them 5-10 minutes before picking them up. Often they’ll re-settle themselves as they’ll just be going into a new sleep cycle, so nursing them or changing their nappy would be useless anyway. But no French book or parent will tell you this! Unlike the complex rules of appellation controllee, for French people it is just so basic and obvious that they presume everyone does it.

Pamela’s children start by attending a creche which is a state run day nursery that most children attend from an early age. So far, so normal. However, things start to get a little more groundbreaking when you check out the menu. Four courses, including a cold vegetable starter, a main course with a side of grains or cooked vegetables, a different cheese each day and a pudding with fresh fruit or fruit puree. So, a normal day’s menu could be tomato salad in vinaigrette, a side dish of peas carrots and onions in a tomato sauce with a white fish, some blue cheese with a piece of baguette and a whole sliced apple. No wonder she calls it a “dining experience” rather than a school lunch.

The main message of the book  is that French parents have a “cadre”, which is a firm framework surrounding a lot of freedom. The “cadre” idea is something that resonates with me and every Perform teacher will recognise it as the underlying structure of every Perform class. In essence, you teach the children the most important and essential rules that are vital for their safety and social development then let them be free within them. In the words of Pamela,  “Being strict about a few key things makes parents seem more reasonable and companionable, and thus makes it more likely that children will obey”.

It’s a fantastic book which has inspired me as a mother. If you haven't read it, I urge you all to get a copy. If you have, please do tell me your thoughts.

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.