Drama

Curriculum Intent

Drama at Paxman Academy is about enabling our students to develop not only their understanding of the world of Drama and its many influential practitioners and playwrights, but also allowing students to develop an understanding of themselves and the world that they exist within. 

Students studying Drama at Paxman have the advantage of working in a purpose built, state of the art performance space. This adds gravitas to the importance that drama plays within the broad and balanced curriculum offered at Paxman Academy.

The sequencing of the curriculum in Drama is designed to ensure that students have a strong foundation in core dramatic skills and knowledge, which they can then build upon in subsequent years. We begin in Year 7 students develop their understanding of the Explorative Strategies and develop their Drama vocabulary. Students will also develop their collaboration skills. The curriculum becomes more challenging in Year 8 as students work with more complex contexts in which to devise their drama responses from. Year 9 sees students developing their understanding of the Drama Medium and Drama Elements in order to deepen their knowledge in preparation for GCSE Drama, should they choose to formally continue with the subject.

At GCSE students’ creativity and imagination are stretched. Students are introduced to a number of published plays as well as given the creative tools to devise their own performances, all the while building on their own cultural capital and understanding of both the wider world and the world of theatre. 

The curriculum offer in Drama creates students who:

• Aspire: to develop self awareness and confidence.
• Success: Through differentiation every student is able to succeed and enjoy the feeling of success.
• Persevere: keep trying to achieve success and who are resilient learners.
• Integrity: be honest and supportive of their peers in all aspects of the learning phase.
• Respect themselves and their peers. To also have an understanding and respect for those who have worked to advance Drama.
• Empathy: consistently show empathy for others and the topics studied,

In addition to this, we offer a weekly Drama Club for each year in KS3 and a ‘Deepening Knowledge’ session for KS4. Both the Drama and Music departments combine to also produce two productions per year, one being a musical, the other being a drama production.