"The children were very excitable to start with, but once they got down to doing something they were great," recalls Bigfoot tutor Emily Mytton of her inaugural session with Class 4AS. She asked the children to split into groups and improvise a sketch depicting a certain country and its time zone. They responded using roleplays, foreign accents and a lot of energy. Afterwards, each group was assigned a poem about an animal and invited to work out a short piece of drama about it. "Children always play up to how they're expected to behave," explains Mytton. "When I turned up they didn't know me, so they felt free to break out of their peer groups within the class and perform something without the fear of being rejected or laughed at."
Bigfoot sends its supply tutors to cover scheduled and unplanned teacher absences at schools, liaising with staff beforehand and devising a scheme of work. All the tutors are jobbing actors, with drama or theatre studies degrees or postgraduate qualifications, and experience of running children's drama workshops. They are also cleared by police to work with children. As they're not qualified teachers, the tutors have to attend two in-house training days per term, helping them to meet the demands of up to 30 excited and inquisitive new faces, some of whom may have behavioural, emotional or learning difficulties. The national curriculum may have squeezed out arts-based subjects to concentrate on literacy and numeracy, but Bigfoot's supply tutors show us how valuable drama can be in helping children to understand and solve problems that may faze them on paper.
