Where Trump and Santa share a stage

Huw Bucknell (pictured) has written a book on staging plays in a hospital school setting. Emily Jenkins finds out what makes him a class act.

PUTTING on a school play is always a challenge: casting, rehearsing, building sets and making costumes, plus dealing with the anxieties of both students and staff, can make it an overwhelming task.

But imagine doing all that twice a year, every year, in a school attached to a child and adolescent mental health services (CAMHS) inpatient unit. In a hospital school where the majority of your cohort are in recovery for acute mental health and psychiatric events.

‘Give school life a vitality and focus’

This is the challenge that Huw Bucknell both embraced and delighted in during his ten-year headship of Forest House Education Centre (FHEC) in Hertfordshire.

“We wanted to make the experience of hospital schooling, which might otherwise feel transitory and ephemeral, into something memorable and meaningful. For the young people in our care, working towards a dramatic performance gives school life a vitality and focus,” explains Huw, who previously worked in a mainstream secondary school as an English and drama teacher.

Working with a small cohort of 13- to 17-year-olds from the inpatient unit (who may be dealing with suicide attempts or severe eating disorders) and year 11 day-pupils supported by CAMHS in the community, Huw and his colleagues embedded two school productions a year into the timetable. Staged at Christmas and at the end of the summer, the original productions, always comedies, were performed by students, script in hand, for families, carers, clinicians and staff.

“The theme and characters would be decided by the group,” explains Huw. This often led to a hilarious mix of characters, including Santa Claus, Dracula and Donald Trump. “The kids loved Trump as a character. Him and the queen were very popular. Boris Johnson only made one appearance,” he laughs.

For Huw, offering drama as a complementary activity to the clinical work

Do you know a class act?

Email educate@ neu.org.uk performance-based enrichment might be fairly unusual in the sector: “Hospital schools don’t tend to know what other hospital schools do due to the nature of safeguarding issues.” of the hospital unit next door is a vital part of recovery and enrichment: “When you’re admitted to hospital with a mental illness it’s a very introspective and disempowering space you find yourself in and this, in part, can be countered by purposeful, celebratory projects.”

Despite Huw and his team’s passion and tireless efforts, the school’s entire teaching staff were made redundant or resigned their positions in the summer of 2022. The new provider has opted not to carry on the tradition of drama work with inpatients.

Ready for further challenges

Huw talks passionately about how drama can help build resilience. Discussing his year 11 pupils, he says: “If they got their GCSEs but were not able to work with other young people and manage to commit to a bigger project, there was always that risk that they might not have the skills to cope in a more challenging environment like a further education college.”

Huw wanted to share his practice with other hospital schools, believing that n Huw’s book and scripts can be downloaded free at spanishamanda. com/drama

So Huw has instead put his knowledge into a book: Creating and Performing Original Drama in an Adolescent Mental Health Setting. The book is a distillation of over a decade’s experience of mounting plays at FHEC and includes several original scripts, as well as resources on writing and devising plays in similar settings. Huw has sent 50 free copies to equivalent CAMHS schools.

“I believe the work we did in FHEC was really transformative for the youngsters we worked with. I’d love to get the word out to as many colleagues as possible,” he says.