Primary Playwrights

Our annual playwrighting porject for 10 & 11 year olds happens in Waltham Forest.

This is an opportunity for Year 6 students to have their work on a professional stage and be part of something truly special. We believe in the power of young voices and want to celebrate their creativity from the very beginning. Don’t miss out on this exciting chance to see your students’ stories come to life in our new theatre in Waltham Forest.

The programme

• Encourages pupils to connect with their imagination whilst encouraging them to express and organise their ideas and made-up stories into dramatic narratives.
• Encourages pupils to articulate meaning in a range of different ways, motivating them to broaden their vocabulary and experiment with different speech and language patterns. As they learn how to take stories from their heads and write them large, they learn and discover different modes of language and styles of writing.
• Pupils learn about laying out scenes clearly so that their scripts can be spoken aloud by other pupils and by professional actors.

The Process

• Each class takes part in five 90-minute creative writing workshops, led by a professional playwright, supported by professional actors. These will take place in October to November, as appropriate to each school and teacher.
• All students are then invited to write a short play (roughly 5 minutes), about any subject they choose, and teachers will submit the scripts to us in December.
• The plays are read, and a selection (x2 from each school) are produced as a professional showcase at Soho Theatre Walthamstow in spring 2025.
• Spring 2025 the schools have their in-house performances, performed by professional actors performing the two winning plays from their school.

This project is open to schools based in Waltham Forest.

Primary Playwrights 2023 photography by Daniaal Khalid