YOUTH ADVISORY BOARD
We set up a Youth Advisory Board (YAB) to ensure that young people’s voices and opinions are heard and acted upon.
The YAB began in 2019 as a group of young people who were passionate about the arts, and who wanted to ensure that young voices were heard in support of the arts.
The young people on the YAB are a diverse group of ages, genders, and ethnicities from our Associate Schools Programme - one of their main aims is to make sure everyone is represented, no matter who they are. They want to make a change in the world we are living in today, and make sure that the arts thrive in the future.
The YAB are dedicated to being:
Passionate about equity and inclusion in the arts;
Respectful of other people’s ideas;
Unafraid to challenge and voice our opinions;
Resolute about making a positive difference in society;
Committed to listening to others and working collaboratively.
Young Creatives’ Convention 2023
The YAB, headline sponsor TikTok and other young people including delegates from the Brit School, Intermission Youth and Silhouette Youth Theatre hosted an all-day event in the Royal Shakespeare Theatre with panel discussions, workshops, and performances led by young people, arts professionals and theatre makers.
The day featured presentations and performances from: Our YAB, Silhouette Youth Theatre, Prime Theatre, Tramshed, Roundhouse, Arts Emergency and the Brit School.
Delegates attended a panel discussion on careers in the arts, open conversations about how to make change, a consultation with the Department for Education, and workshops on safeguarding, mental health, and representation in Shakespeare.
Campaign for representation of diverse playwrights on the curriculum
Members of our YAB worked with Young Agitators at the Royal Court Theatre to broaden the range of writers studied on the Drama GCSE curriculum.
They met with representatives from the major exam boards to discuss why representation is so important for young people and to challenge them about the narrowness of the list of studied authors.
To increase and broaden representation of voices and themes on the syllabus, Pearson Edexcel and AQA have added new texts to their lists of optional text for study, including The Empress by Tanika Gupta.
The RSC has developed a suite of resources for teaching The Empress to support teachers in making the change to using more diverse texts in the classroom.
"I am pleased that Pearson have decided to expand their texts and am glad to hear that there will be things put in place to convince some schools to switch to these texts. I know this will be beneficial to students like me who grow up surrounded by people who are different to them, so that they can see that they’re not alone and identify with the experiences of the characters and events in the plays." - Ella (YAB member)
Explore our resources for teaching The Empress: The Empress Teacher Pack
