Why we’re sticking with online drama classes for children

By Lucy Askew, Creation Theatre CEO and Home Delivery parent

At the start of the pandemic we moved our Drama Classes online and rapidly created what we now refer to as “Home Delivery”. Weekly sessions, online, led by professional actors, jam packed with energy and creativity where we introduce children to a new story each week. The sessions are a world away from a lesson simply transposed into Zoom and embrace technology creating immersive, interactive experiences for children that truly re-define “screen-time”. To support the lessons, each week children are posted a package with craft activities, secret notes from characters and creative challenges to further pull them into imaginative worlds.

Now we can return to in-person delivery we are bucking the trend and sticking online, here are five great reasons why, click or read on for more:

 

Lucy spying on a Home Delivery session at home! All the pictures in this article have been sent to us by Home Delivery parents.

Online classes are more sustainable

This is a huge one for me. By delivering sessions online parents no longer need to get in cars or on buses to travel to weekly sessions. We’ve crunched the data from our previous in person sessions, looking at travel times and surveying audiences on how they there, and even allowing for the cost of running a computer for an hour, there’s a whopping 96% reduction in carbon emissions. You can read more about our study into the carbon reduction associated with Digital work here.

It’s a radical thought isn’t it? We can deliver culturally enriching, confidence building sessions, have great fun along the way and massively reduce our impact on the environment.

On a personal note, I have three children (terrible environmental choice, I know). When I hear the news of record temperatures in the Arctic and Antarctic and think about the catastrophic effect this could have in their lifetimes, I feel sick. I can’t then in good conscience come to work and spend my day persuading people to get in cars and travel anymore. When you choose to attend an in person session you are making the choice to add one car to the road, when I make the decision to move Drama Clubs in person I am putting 180 cars on the road per week.

 

The consequences of failing to address climate change will be a devastating and bleak future for our children, we have to be prepared to make radical changes to how we live our lives now for their sakes.

Of course you may be reading this thinking “but I always used to walk to Drama Club sessions this doesn’t apply to me”. Yes this would mean you could happily attend knowing your travel had no negative environmental impact. Sadly though with the Creation heartland in Oxford, one of the most expensive cities in the country, we cannot afford to pay the kind of salaries to either our Drama Club leaders or core team that would enable them to live in the city. You may not be getting in car to get there but unavoidably we are.

The consequences of failing to address climate change will be a devastating and bleak future for our children, we have to be prepared to make radical changes to how we live our lives now for their sakes.

Online classes give you back time

It can’t be overstated how much children benefit and gain confidence and security from routine.  Over the past two years they have experienced so little of this. School is cancelled, lessons are cancelled, holidays are cancelled, parties are cancelled. Over two years they have experienced disappointment after disappointment. Even when events do go ahead, they may test positive for Covid and have to miss out. It will take time to understand the impact of this repeated disruption and disappointment on a generation of children. With Home Delivery we have never needed to cancel a session, we can seamlessly cover leaders if they are ill, and children can attend even when they are isolating from school. It is constant for our members and we think at this moment in history that’s a pretty big deal.

What next?

We’re chucking just as much resource, energy, creativity and love in to delivering online sessions as we were at the start of the pandemic – it was an unavoidable change at the time, but now we’re not looking back. Teaching creativity, confidence and a love of classic stories online is something we’re in for the long haul, and if we’ve made this much progress already, imagine what we can achieve in the next two, five or 10 years!

If you’d like to come along for the ride, we offer free tasters at all our sessions, you can find out the logistics bits and sign up for one here.

 

It can’t be overstated how much children benefit and gain confidence and security from routine.  Over the past two years they have experienced so little of this. School is cancelled, lessons are cancelled, holidays are cancelled, parties are cancelled. Over two years they have experienced disappointment after disappointment. Even when events do go ahead, they may test positive for Covid and have to miss out. It will take time to understand the impact of this repeated disruption and disappointment on a generation of children. With Home Delivery we have never needed to cancel a session, we can seamlessly cover leaders if they are ill, and children can attend even when they are isolating from school. It is constant for our members and we think at this moment in history that’s a pretty big deal.

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What next?

We’re chucking just as much resource, energy, creativity and love in to delivering online sessions as we were at the start of the pandemic – it was an unavoidable change at the time, but now we’re not looking back. Teaching creativity, confidence and a love of classic stories online is something we’re in for the long haul, and if we’ve made this much progress already, imagine what we can achieve in the next two, five or 10 years!

If you’d like to come along for the ride, we offer free tasters at all our sessions, you can find out the logistics bits and sign up for one here.

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Running classes online increases the quality of the sessions and associated learning outcomes

This is a hard one to write because I don’t want to in anyway diminish the great work our leaders have done teaching in person session over the years. I’ve been working in after school education provision for 20 years though, and the fact is the quality of sessions we are delivering online is higher than what we’ve ever been able to achieve in a room.

Why?

 

Staffing in person sessions is a constant challenge and drain on resources. Pre-pandemic if took two full time members of our team to deal with venue and staffing logistics. The best leaders were frequently unable to work at the last minute due to auditions or acting jobs, venues would cancel with little notice. Our running costs were high, and next to no time was free to look at quality of sessions and learning outcomes. Home Delivery has revolutionised this, directly putting our team’s time into creating incredible sessions. It’s enabled us to take on AMAZING actors like Ryan who don’t need to live in Oxford and are on full time PAYE contracts. Seeing the quality of sessions as a parent led our Education Manager Sarah to reduce her primary school teaching hours to join the team, and she has been helping us further align the sessions to the most beneficial learning outcomes for our members.

Seeing the quality of sessions as a parent led our Education Manager Sarah to reduce her primary school teaching hours to join the team, and she has been helping us further align the sessions to the most beneficial learning outcomes for our members.

There’s also a transparency to the sessions which keeps them SUPER engaging. Parents can watch the whole thing, if a session fails to hit the mark the children can just wander off. With in-person teaching even the most engaging leader in the world will have children who get distracted looking out of the window or stroll off to the toilets for half the session. As a parent though, you will pick them up and have no idea how engaged they were for the full session and what sort of quality of delivery you have paid for. Online our sessions are rigorously tested and developed, if an activity isn’t keeping the kids engaged a whole team are reviewing and adapting it to make sure that it does.

Online classes are more accessible

Delivering sessions online is more accessible for a wider variety of families. We charge less for Home Delivery than in person sessions, which added to rocketing petrol prices makes it a significantly cheaper option. It can be accessed by children all over the world, including remote areas where getting to in person teaching can be particularly problematic. Physical access barriers can be removed by being at home and for neurologically diverse children learning in a domestic environment can remove many triggering smells, sights and sounds that can be unavoidable when attending sessions in person. For children with ADHD online sessions can aid focus and minimise distractions, and for all children there are benefits in being surrounded by a familiar environment.

We believe ‘uncancelability’ gives routine

 

It can’t be overstated how much children benefit and gain confidence and security from routine.  Over the past two years they have experienced so little of this. School is cancelled, lessons are cancelled, holidays are cancelled, parties are cancelled. Over two years they have experienced disappointment after disappointment. Even when events do go ahead, they may test positive for Covid and have to miss out. It will take time to understand the impact of this repeated disruption and disappointment on a generation of children. With Home Delivery we have never needed to cancel a session, we can seamlessly cover leaders if they are ill, and children can attend even when they are isolating from school. It is constant for our members and we think at this moment in history that’s a pretty big deal.

What next?

We’re chucking just as much resource, energy, creativity and love in to delivering online sessions as we were at the start of the pandemic – it was an unavoidable change at the time, but now we’re not looking back. Teaching creativity, confidence and a love of classic stories online is something we’re in for the long haul, and if we’ve made this much progress already, imagine what we can achieve in the next two, five or 10 years!

If you’d like to come along for the ride, we offer free tasters at all our sessions, you can find out the logistics bits and sign up for one here.

 

Again as a Home Delivery parent this one truly deeply means a lot to me personally. Not having to drive/walk/bus your child to a session gives you back time. We crunched the numbers and reckon running the sessions online gives parents back an average of 23 hours per term! A year’s membership gives you nearly three days back – and that’s just through removing the travel (we factored in logging in time). It also gives me something truly precious, rare and spectacular – an hour where my daughter is fully focused, engaged, happy, and not wanting my attention.

Home Delivery for me is a quiet cup of tea, a phone call to catch up with my Mum, peacefully folding laundry, focused time to catch up on work (bar the odd interruption to help find something for a frantic scavenger hunt).

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Running classes online increases the quality of the sessions and associated learning outcomes

This is a hard one to write because I don’t want to in anyway diminish the great work our leaders have done teaching in person session over the years. I’ve been working in after school education provision for 20 years though, and the fact is the quality of sessions we are delivering online is higher than what we’ve ever been able to achieve in a room.

Why?

 

Staffing in person sessions is a constant challenge and drain on resources. Pre-pandemic if took two full time members of our team to deal with venue and staffing logistics. The best leaders were frequently unable to work at the last minute due to auditions or acting jobs, venues would cancel with little notice. Our running costs were high, and next to no time was free to look at quality of sessions and learning outcomes. Home Delivery has revolutionised this, directly putting our team’s time into creating incredible sessions. It’s enabled us to take on AMAZING actors like Ryan who don’t need to live in Oxford and are on full time PAYE contracts. Seeing the quality of sessions as a parent led our Education Manager Sarah to reduce her primary school teaching hours to join the team, and she has been helping us further align the sessions to the most beneficial learning outcomes for our members.

Seeing the quality of sessions as a parent led our Education Manager Sarah to reduce her primary school teaching hours to join the team, and she has been helping us further align the sessions to the most beneficial learning outcomes for our members.

There’s also a transparency to the sessions which keeps them SUPER engaging. Parents can watch the whole thing, if a session fails to hit the mark the children can just wander off. With in-person teaching even the most engaging leader in the world will have children who get distracted looking out of the window or stroll off to the toilets for half the session. As a parent though, you will pick them up and have no idea how engaged they were for the full session and what sort of quality of delivery you have paid for. Online our sessions are rigorously tested and developed, if an activity isn’t keeping the kids engaged a whole team are reviewing and adapting it to make sure that it does.

Online classes are more accessible

Delivering sessions online is more accessible for a wider variety of families. We charge less for Home Delivery than in person sessions, which added to rocketing petrol prices makes it a significantly cheaper option. It can be accessed by children all over the world, including remote areas where getting to in person teaching can be particularly problematic. Physical access barriers can be removed by being at home and for neurologically diverse children learning in a domestic environment can remove many triggering smells, sights and sounds that can be unavoidable when attending sessions in person. For children with ADHD online sessions can aid focus and minimise distractions, and for all children there are benefits in being surrounded by a familiar environment.

We believe ‘uncancelability’ gives routine

 

It can’t be overstated how much children benefit and gain confidence and security from routine.  Over the past two years they have experienced so little of this. School is cancelled, lessons are cancelled, holidays are cancelled, parties are cancelled. Over two years they have experienced disappointment after disappointment. Even when events do go ahead, they may test positive for Covid and have to miss out. It will take time to understand the impact of this repeated disruption and disappointment on a generation of children. With Home Delivery we have never needed to cancel a session, we can seamlessly cover leaders if they are ill, and children can attend even when they are isolating from school. It is constant for our members and we think at this moment in history that’s a pretty big deal.

What next?

We’re chucking just as much resource, energy, creativity and love in to delivering online sessions as we were at the start of the pandemic – it was an unavoidable change at the time, but now we’re not looking back. Teaching creativity, confidence and a love of classic stories online is something we’re in for the long haul, and if we’ve made this much progress already, imagine what we can achieve in the next two, five or 10 years!

If you’d like to come along for the ride, we offer free tasters at all our sessions, you can find out the logistics bits and sign up for one here.

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