Currie High School case study

Donna Jordan is a Pupil Support Leader at Currie Community High School, a comprehensive of 776 pupils in South-West Edinburgh. Donna came to her first Children’s Festival in 2007, and since then she has been a regular attender. As well as bringing whole year groups of pupils to the Festival, she devises follow-up activities in the classroom designed to deepen young people’s engagement with the production which they see.

Donna has established a cross-curricular Creative Learning Project for S3 pupils in Currie High School, based around productions at the Children’s Festival. Donna designs the annual programme for this project and her colleagues from Health and Wellbeing, Expressive Arts, Modern Languages and Social Subjects facilitate the classroom activities.

The pupils who take part in this project are given free rein to create artworks inspired by themes and ideas from a production at the Children’s Festival. Recent results included modern-day war propaganda posters inspired by A Feast of Bones, and the imagined diary of a refugee’s journey, inspired by We Come From Far, Far Away.

In 2018, Currie Community High pupils also took part in Project Mbuzeni, benefiting from in-school workshops with a professional playwright, and a post-show workshop. In the clip below, Donna explains why she values the Children’s Festival.