ABSTRACT
Since the pioneering work of Caldwell Cook, a teacher of English at the turn of the century, there has been a symbiotic relationship between English and drama in secondary schools. Caldwell Cook proposed the then-radical notion that students should perform rather than read the plays of the dramatic canon. Over the next decades, the advances that were made in establishing drama in schools were dependent on both the patronage and the support of policy-makers, managers and theorists in the field of English education. In 1984, Tricia Evans claimed that English teachers taught 75% of drama lessons in the secondary phase (Evans, 1984). While the growth of drama as a separate subject area during the 1980s and 1990s has led to a greater degree of specialism and a growing autonomy from English, drama still depends on its ‘mother’ subject for protection and as a conduit for influencing future policy. At the time of writing, for instance, drama in secondary schools is once again being seen as a means of meeting priorities in English—in this case the National Literacy Strategy. This is a familiar pattern, in which drama teachers make claims that drama is the most effective means of resolving a wide range of issues and moral panics, which have their genesis in English education—speaking and listening, writing and falling standards in literacy generally. These claims arise out of the understandable insecurities of a minority subject, which is still held in some suspicion in universities, let alone in schools. In trying to free itself from the apron strings of English, drama teachers have sought to carve out their own curriculum territory. However, more often than not, the growth and declines that mark the history of drama in schools have been the consequences of developments and progress in the field of English in schools.
