Tomorrow the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) launches a major campaign looking at the way in which Shakespeare is taught and assessed in our schools and colleges. Aware of the fact that many young people leave school with the impression that Shakespeare is 'boring', the RSC is looking for a radical re-evaluation of the way that children are introduced to the Bard in the classroom.

Calling for a theatre-based approach to teaching Shakespeare and a re-evaluation of assessment techniques by the Government, the RSC's Teaching Shakespeare: Time For Change campaign gets underway on Friday 22 September 2006, with an opening symposium being held at The Swan Theatre in Stratford-upon-Avon. The aims of the symposium are:

• to provide opportunities for students to explore the plays through theatre-based approaches;
• to give young people access to at least one live performance of a Shakespeare play during the course of their school career;
• to seek greater training and support for teachers, many of whom have never been given the confidence and skills to teach Shakespeare as a performance text;
• to explore alternative ways of assessing student understanding of Shakespeare's plays.

To coincide with the launch of the campaign, some of the country's best known writers, politicians, actors and personalities recall their first encounters with the Bard, including journalist Yasmin Alibhai-Brown, who said: "We had a new drama teacher, beautiful, tall and blonde. Joyce Mann decided to shake things up by producing Romeo and Juliet for a drama competition. She, a white woman, decided to cast black Africans as the Montagues and Asian Africans as the Capulets. It was radical, the right thing to do, but naïve."

"She didn't know just how deeply divided we were. I was Juliet. Romeo was like a ballet dancer, had smooth reflective skin and treacle eyes'[Mrs Mann] had to train us to kiss properly on the mouth, alone in a classroom away from horrified eyes. The play was lauded and I won the best actress prize. I rushed home, an elated Juliet. But these possibilities were callously snuffed out by my family, my father most of all, who punished me with a deadly silence. We are living his plays not merely watching them. Although it hurt for years, and still does, the fallout from that production proved invaluable."

Panellists for the symposium include Michael Boyd: Artistic Director, RSC, Chuk Iwuji: Actor in current RSC Histories Cycle, Philip Beadle: Guardian Secondary School Teacher of the Year, 2004, Dr Bethan Marshall: Senior Lecturer in English Education, Kings College London, Bruce Wall: Executive Director, London Shakespeare Workout and Susan Norman: Director, Society for Effective Affective Learning. For further information about the symposium and the campaign, visit: www.rsc.org.uk/learning.

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