Why every school should teach drama

Drama is one of the first subjects to face the cut when school budgets tighten. It’s seen as a luxury — a nice-to-have for children who are naturally theatrical, but not a core part of the curriculum that every child needs. This view is mistaken, and the evidence against it is substantial. Drama is not a luxury. It is, for many children, the subject that unlocks everything else.

Here’s the case for drama in every school — and why the skills it teaches are more valuable than ever in the world our children are growing into.

Drama teaches communication

The ability to communicate clearly, confidently, and with appropriate emotional intelligence is one of the most valued skills in every field of human endeavour, from medicine to engineering to business to the arts. And yet it is, astonishingly, barely taught in most schools. We assume that children will absorb communication skills osmotically — by exposure to other people communicating — rather than by deliberate practice.

Drama is deliberate practice in communication. It teaches children to project their voice, to modulate their tone, to use their body to convey meaning, to listen as actively as they speak. It teaches them to read an audience — to notice when they’ve lost attention and adjust, when they’ve connected and press home the advantage. These are skills that take years to develop, and drama is one of the few contexts in which children can develop them systematically, safely, and with immediate feedback.

Drama develops emotional intelligence

Emotional intelligence — the ability to understand, manage, and appropriately express emotions, and to understand and respond to the emotions of others — is consistently ranked among the most important qualities in professional and personal success. It is also remarkably difficult to teach in a classroom context, because it requires practice rather than instruction.

Drama provides that practice in abundance. When children inhabit a character, they are required to understand that character’s emotional landscape — what they feel, why they feel it, how those feelings affect their behaviour. When they perform a scene with another actor, they are required to respond in real time to another person’s emotional state. When they watch their peers perform, they are required to read and interpret emotional communication. All of this is emotional intelligence in action, practiced repeatedly in a structured, supported context.

Drama builds resilience

There’s a moment that happens in every drama class, every rehearsal, every performance: something goes wrong. A line is forgotten. A prop falls over. An entrance is missed. The scene grinds to an unexpected halt, and everyone looks at each other, and the question in the air is: what do we do now?

In drama, the answer is always: we carry on. We improvise, we adapt, we find another way through. And then we carry on. This recovery — from the small, manageable failure in a safe context — is exactly the kind of resilience practice that children need, and that the rest of the curriculum rarely provides. Academic subjects reward correctness; drama rewards the ability to respond constructively to things going wrong. That’s an enormously valuable lesson.

Drama improves literacy and language

The connection between drama and literacy is well established and consistently undervalued. Children who engage in dramatic work — speaking lines aloud, inhabiting characters, exploring stories through performance — develop stronger vocabulary, better reading comprehension, and more sophisticated understanding of narrative structure than children who don’t.

The reason is straightforward: drama requires close reading. To perform a text, you have to understand it — not just its surface meaning, but its subtext, its emotional underpinning, its relationship between what characters say and what they mean. A child who has performed a scene from Shakespeare, however simplified, understands that scene in a way that a child who has merely read it does not.

Drama also gives children ownership of language in a way that few other activities can. When you speak words aloud, before an audience, with intention and feeling, those words become yours in a new way. The confidence this builds in relation to language — the sense that words are tools you can use, not obstacles to be navigated — carries over powerfully into writing, reading, and all other language-based learning.

Drama nurtures empathy and social understanding

At a moment when concerns about social fragmentation, polarisation, and declining empathy are widespread, drama offers something genuinely valuable: a structured practice in seeing the world through other people’s eyes. This is not incidental to drama; it is fundamental. You cannot perform a character without understanding them from the inside, and that understanding — however briefly, however imperfectly achieved — is empathy.

Children who engage regularly in dramatic work show consistently stronger theory of mind skills than those who don’t. They are better at reading social situations, better at understanding conflict, better at navigating the complex emotional landscape of school life and, later, adult life. These benefits extend well beyond the drama room, and they last.

Drama serves all kinds of learners

One of drama’s great unsung virtues is its accessibility to children who struggle with traditional academic learning. Children who find sitting still and reading difficult often thrive in a drama context, where learning is embodied, active, and social. Children who are shy or anxious in social situations often discover, to their own surprise, that they can speak and perform in a drama context in ways they cannot elsewhere — the structure and the permission of the theatrical frame creates a safety that ordinary social interaction doesn’t offer.

Drama is also one of the few subjects that rewards a genuinely diverse range of talents. The child who is brilliant at memorising lines is valued; so is the child who is brilliant at improvising. The natural leader and the natural collaborator both find their place. The child who is gifted at design and the child who is gifted at physical expression both have something essential to contribute. Drama sees children whole, in a way that a curriculum focused on narrow academic measures often doesn’t.

The case for keeping drama

When schools cut drama, they don’t just lose a subject. They lose a practice space for communication, resilience, empathy, and creativity — skills that their students will need every day for the rest of their lives. The argument that drama is a luxury is precisely backwards: in a world that increasingly demands these human qualities, drama is one of the most practically useful things a school can offer.

The cost of losing it is not felt immediately. It’s felt years later, in the grown-up who can’t speak confidently in public, the professional who struggles to read a room, the adult who finds it difficult to access other people’s perspectives. These losses are real and significant, and they trace back — at least in part — to a curriculum that decided drama wasn’t important enough to keep.

Theatre at home and in school

You don’t have to wait for the curriculum to catch up. Theatrical experience — in all its forms, including the intimate and accessible form of tabletop theatre — is available at home, and it delivers the same benefits. At Create Theatre, we make handcrafted tabletop theatres that bring drama within reach of every family and every classroom.

Sign up below to be the first to hear when we launch, and join a community that believes in the power of theatre to educate, inspire, and transform.

Join the Create Theatre community — sign up for updates today.

Create Theatre in Your Life