The dawning of the "merrie month of May" has traditionally been a time for throwing off inhibitions since long before Shakespeare's time. So this year's absence of Sats at key stage 3 might have been expected to induce a feeling of liberation among those charged with keeping the English bard's works alive in classrooms nearly 400 years after his death. Freed from the tyranny of teaching to the test, this should be a fertile time for sowing the seeds of imagination in receptive young minds.
A new brochure has just gone out to schools from the Royal Shakespeare Company's education department, advertising its continuing professional development (CPD) courses, and carrying a ringing endorsement from Christine Blower, general secretary of the National Union of Teachers. "There is an alternative to the banalities of test-driven Shakespeare," she writes. "The RSC's approach to teaching and learning about Shakespeare engages young people's enthusiasm for the richness of his world."
But it would appear some of Blower's members - as well as teachers affiliated to other unions - do not share her enthusiasm. Or if they do, they have been overruled by senior managers more interested in balancing budgets than sharing the richness of Shakespeare's world with 14-year-olds. One state school has apparently sold off its year 9 Romeo and Juliet texts to a nearby independent school because they "won't need them any more".
Apocryphal or not, that story sums up what Ian McNeilly of the National Association for the Teaching of English calls the "short-sightedness" of schools and local authorities who are "so geared to league tables that any activity that doesn't provide measurable results immediately moves down their priorities". Hence the sharp decline in CPD courses for teachers and visits to schools by theatre professionals. No sooner had the government announced last October that testing would no longer be compulsory at year 9 than phones began to ring at the RSC. Around 50% of its Inset (in-school education training) and CPD courses at Stratford-on-Avon and London's Roundhouse were cancelled.
Devastating effect
That much was well documented at the time. Less well known has been the devastating effect on smaller theatre companies that have been working in schools to make Shakespeare more accessible to 21st-century teenagers. "A near catastrophe" is how business manager Bill Robertson describes what has happened to the Bitesize Theatre Company, based in Wrexham but touring schools across England and Wales. At least it was touring. "Shakespeare work was the most profitable thing we did, and it subsidised all of our other tours," he says. "It brought in £85,000 out of an annual turnover of £210,000. But as soon as the government made its announcement, schools began to cancel. We went from 375 bookings to just 14.
"We know from our experience of five years ago, when the Welsh board abolished Sats, that we are unlikely to have many takers in future and it will be more difficult to sell Shakespeare productions in secondary schools. The attitude seems to be, 'If there's no exam to work towards, what's the point in spending money on it?'... We've had to make our administrative staff redundant as well as reducing our overheads to a bare minimum."
Meanwhile, the St Alban's-based Mopa Theatre Company has been laying off actors. "We'd normally have four tours on the build-up to Sats in May," says its artistic director, Nic Brownlie. "As it's turned out, we have done one since half-term, working at 60% capacity ... They started cancelling from the day of the announcement."
Has this made him wistful for the return of Sats at key stage 3? "Not at all. I appreciate that they were very limiting," he says. "I think many teachers are disappointed at having to cancel our visits. They could see the value of what we did - going through the sort of process that a Shakespearean actor has in the rehearsal room when the play is stripped down and reassembled so that you understand every part of it. Unfortunately, we have a short-sighted education system run by senior managers who are obsessed with budgets and exams."
But Brownlie is saddened that an opportunity has been missed. "Because human nature hasn't changed in 400 years, Shakespeare can show us things that we don't understand about our own society," he says. Mopa has now put its Shakespeare work "on the back burner" while it talks to primary care trusts about dramas to educate children on the issue of obesity.
The RSC would never put Shakespeare on the back burner, of course. Shakespeare is the reason for its existence. And its head of school partnerships, Rachel Gartside, seems resolutely optimistic when I call in at her office. The 50% drop in Inset and CPD courses came just a few months after the RSC launched its Stand Up for Shakespeare campaign, with a three-pronged manifesto: start it early, do it on your feet, and see it live. So has anything changed since the downturn following the government's decision to scrap key stage 3 testing?
Ambition
"Yes, I think it definitely has," she says, despite conceding that those schools who cancelled have stayed cancelled. "We're increasingly being asked to set up Inset courses that offer an opportunity for colleagues at key stages 2, 3 and 4 to get together. We have primary and secondary teachers from the same local authority coming here to Stratford or getting together on our outreach programmes. That fits in well with our ambition to scaffold a child's experience from early years education to GCSE level, so that they're not, aged 14 or 15, faced with a dense literary text for the first time while sitting at a desk."
How can those dense literary texts be absorbed at early years level? "What you can do," Gartside suggests, "is to build a multisensory environment designed around, say, the magic forest in A Midsummer Night's Dream, and introduce some storytelling and simple drama work that contains some of the easier phrases from the play."
She talks about children's "entitlement" to enjoy Shakespeare rather than their "compulsion" to study him. She hopes the removal of Sats at key stage 3 will be seen as an opportunity to rethink ways of deconstructing plays in the classroom rather than focusing on two scenes from two set texts to meet test requirements. She cites 50 schools that the RSC works with nationally and the growing clusters of schools around them that are learning from their "best practice".
But Gartside fears some headteachers and local authorities will delay the introduction of Shakespeare until GCSE year, when there is still a statutory requirement to study two set texts, and exclude pupils considered to be of low academic ability. "We've seen at firsthand the increase in confidence and self-esteem that Shakespeare can bring to pupils, regardless of their backgrounds," she says.
The removal of the Sats at year 9 should increase the chances of exciting the interest of non-academic children, she maintains. At the same time, she is aware teachers will need a way of assessing performance without recourse to a formal test. To that end, the RSC has been working with the Qualifications and Curriculum Authority to produce a framework. "It's only conjecture at this stage," Garside says, "but I think that the scrapping of Sats at key stage 3 will eventually be seen as an opportunity by schools with vision to promote the value of Shakespeare."
And what is that value? The RSC's artistic director, Michael Boyd, encouraging schools to take part in a recent national Shakespeare assemblies' week, said: "Shakespeare remains the world's favourite artist because his living dilemmas of love, mortality, power and citizenship remain unresolved, vivid and urgent today."