Hi I’m Emma, I have been a drama teacher for 15 years now, time flies when you're having fun! I am incredibly passionate about the arts and now in my role as Head of Performing arts I thrive on creating a cohesive partnership with my team ensuring that we as educators are successful in providing an enriched, rigorous and creative curriculum developing and inspiring the young people in our classrooms. I've taught at state schools and went through the academisation with both. Working at my last school for 8 years with a large department, then I moved to a smaller school after drama and dance was cut at KS3 to be a one man band subject leader. My department has now grown so I am now Head of Performing Arts. I have also been HoY for over 6 years. I have been at my current school for 7 years and I have created a rigorous and enriched curriculum, directed 5 school productions (started in my first year with a cast of 35 to now over 100 students involved - 1 in 7 students are apart of it), run a variety of clubs and have so much fun raising the profile of Performing arts. We have joined with a local stage school Theatre Rocket to start The Surrey Festival of Musical Theatre and the Arts, this year we placed Gold, silver and Bronze in every category we entered in, it was a great success and wonderful to see a range of students from different schools and backgrounds have the opportunity to perform and thrive. This year we have also introduced the ESB spec for Oracy offering students the opportunity to excel in speaking exams to support the transferable skills we pride ourselves in teaching every student. I have always been passionate about performing but fell in love with teaching when I taught in Africa for Theatre in Education in my 3rd year of University. I knew it was what I wanted to do, inspiring young people, developing passions and empowering each individual to have the confidence to achieve greatness. Having completed the Drama Matters networking weekend for the last 3 years, I found Tracy to be truly inspirational and I have learnt so much from those 2 days than I had done most of my career. I knew I wanted to get more involved and help spread the wonderful message of Drama Matters!