Drama at Willington allows the children to express themselves in a creative and collaborative way, through movement and interaction with others. The subject promotes imagination and multi-sensory learning and develops essential life-long skills such as creativity, enquiry, communication, empathy, self confidence, cooperation, leadership and negotiation. Above all, we aim to make Drama fun and an enjoyable, memorable learning experience for our pupils.

In the Pre-Prep department, Drama is integrated into the curriculum, with opportunities for exploring stories, role-play and developing speaking and listening during circle time activities. In Years 3 and 4, Drama is used as a cross-curricular tool, as well as a vehicle for developing the pupils’ public speaking skills and poetry performance.

In Year 5 and 6, the pupils have a standalone Drama lesson per week. These lessons provide the children with opportunities to express their thoughts, opinions and emotions in a supportive environment, as well as providing meaningful cross-curricular links to other subjects such as English, History and PSHE. Previous cross-curricular topics have included Remembrance Day, the Anglo-Saxons, The Rainforest and Bullying. We also aim to develop the pupils’ speaking and listening skills by exploring key dramatic techniques such as voice and projection, gesture, mime and script work.

The Year 6 Leavers Production is a wonderful chance for our oldest pupils to celebrate their time at Willington and gives them an opportunity to showcase their skills, both on and off stage. Previous productions have included ‘Dream On’, ‘Pantastic’ and ‘Robin and the Sherwood Hoodies’.

We offer various extra-curricular clubs such as Film Making from the MMN Academy, Performing Arts club for KS2 and for our younger pupils, Polka Drama club. We also run a Drama scholarship programme, for those pupils wishing to apply for 11+ Drama scholarships.