Where and what?

• Most often, Theatres of Learning are specially set up in disused spaces, empty schools or large retail units.
• The Cloth Place (an example of a Theatre of Learning) arranges hundreds of objects, garden sheds and tools, straw, kitchen units and kitchen utensils along side an abundance of cloth people and animals. Real fruit and vegetables are added to this mix and the whole thing is made to look like a small town or village with shops, a farmyard, a beauty salon, a crypt, a kitchen, a café, a clothes shops and so on.
• Theatres of Learning can also be expeditions under canvas with timetabled action times during which children are filmed exploring beaches, being in boats, catching fish or making paper sculptures with their parents.

Why?

• Theatres of Learning are multipurpose and can be used to support different aims. Schools, local authorities and community groups across the country have different priorities. Theatres of Learning focus on specific priorities agreed between those taking part and Big Wide Talk.
• A group of schools might want to improve standards by raising the attainment of children seen as hard to engage, challenging or troubled. Theatres of Learning can focus reflection with these children and their families opening up dialogue, shining a light on hidden talents and raising expectations.
• A town might want to showcase its children for a centenary or festival. Big Wide Talk Theatres of Learning can do this by producing documentaries for whole projects and or the individual families taking part.
• A community might want to pull together to enhance or change its profile. Theatres of Learning can give people fresh pride in their place and themselves.
• A local authority might want to replace existing or diminished family support services in areas of high need. Theatres of Learning can support families in groups learning about their children along with local professionals.
• Theatres of Learning are filmed because we know from experience of working with more than 20,000 children that they love the space the camera gives them to tell their own stories.
• Film of the children is edited sometimes by parents, sometimes by teachers, in collaboration with the Big Wide Talk team as part of a reflective process of development.
• Children and adults then move on to talk about their experience in class groups, professional development days and seminars. During the seminars parents, teachers and other professionals talk together about what has been learned.

How?

• The partners in the project, (schools, community groups and local authorities) agree, together with Big Wide Talk, what the priorities are for lasting impacts. For example; reducing educational disengagement, increasing parental engagement or community cohesion, support for vulnerable children. These impacts are pursued in the reflective follow up, for example by choosing to focus attention on vulnerable or disengaged children and their families.
• Film is edited and stored using Big Wide Talk database driven technologies.
• Big Wide Talk conducts reflective sessions with children, parents and professionals as agreed with the partners. Films are made, seminars are organised and professional development days are held as agreed with the partners.
• Big Wide Talk does all of the design and set up of the spaces.
• The spaces are set up as villages or giant experiments with light, space and patterns. All are designed to be safe and visually exciting.
• Each Theatre of Learning takes around six to eight months to complete from planning to creation of agreed final product.
• The partners offer Theatres of Learning to whole populations of children so that children are never stigmatised. Targeting occurs in an organic way, for example; children previously seen as hard to engage become engaged during the Theatre of Learning allowing teachers and other workers to follow this up in the classroom. However, vulnerable children will need special attention after Theatres of Learning, often working in small groups with their carers or families.

Funding

• The costs of a Theatre of Learning vary. Scale is mostly determined by the funding available.
• Big Wide Talk is entirely not for profit and guarantee to spend all available funding on each specific Theatre of Learning. Big Wide Talk does not charge overheads but rather works on a project by project basis.
• Costs per child and therefore to each of the partner organisations reduces as the numbers of participants increases. Big Wide Talk prefers to work with around 3,000 children per project, perhaps from ten or more local primary schools. This means that all of the set up and take down costs can be effectively shared, and ensures a good mix of parents and professionals for shared reflection.
• For any population of children taking part in a Theatre of Learning, it is usual that some 20% at least will be children with special needs of some kind. In especially poor areas this percentage is often higher, but Big Wide Talk has calculated that in each Theatre of Learning 20% of the children reached will be those most likely to leave school underachieving.
• A group or network of schools can decide to fund a Theatre of Learning entirely on their own terms using monies available to them for children requiring extra support (Pupil Premium) in combination with funding designated for Learning Outside the Classroom or professional development.
• A filmmaking grant can be applied for.
• The Heritage Lottery Fund supports the creation of local histories and other forms of social history such as the archives generated by a Theatre of Learning that tells the story of local people and the place in which they grew up.