Wow - it's been yet another hectic week! No rest for the wicked, eh?

This week I've been working hard with our Regional Partner Simon Fielding on developing a new series of training courses for our Perform teachers.

Simon originally joined us 9 years ago as a Producer - and then soon became an Area Partner, visiting schools, evaluating teachers etc, but last term we decided to set him a brand new challenge. We're focusing on growth here at Perform, but I'm absolutely passionate about ensuring that standards don't slip as we grow. You see, unlike all other children's drama classes, we don't operate as franchises - instead, all Perform schools are centrally managed and they all run the same curriculum so we can maintain the high quality of our workshops across the board.

Over the years Simon's been instrumental in helping to evolve the Perform style of teaching that we a call ?learning through laughter'. He is staggeringly good at his job and such an inspiring trainer.

We've always held regular termly training but Simon's brief was to ?make the workshops even more fantastic' and as part of this we've been writing and developing new programmes for our teachers to attend. From September he'll be running two training sessions a week over a 14 week period and individual teachers will be invited to attend in order to develop areas of their teaching and improve their skills.

He's now in the process of creating these workshops for teachers which will encompass a broad range of topics including:

• How to inspire & lead the children
• New ways to deliver the Perform drama games and really bring them to life
• How to recognise key areas for development in individual children and help the child to realise them
• How to deal with disruptive children
• Going the extra mile to create an amazing session
• How to develop your teaching style

These workshops are a key part of our commitment to continually train and develop our talented teachers to give them the tools they need to deliver a brilliant experience for the children. We always want to keep improving what we do.

I'm really excited about the workshops - I plan to attend/observe them myself and of course we'll be gathering feedback after the sessions so we can gain an understanding of what the teachers found useful, what worked and what didn't, and of course ideas for future courses too.

I'm pretty sure that some of the content will be useful for parents, so undoubtedly I'll be sharing some of it here too!

Speaking of which, I'd be really keen to gain an understanding of what you'd like to see on the blog - so, if there are any questions you'd like to ask; or perhaps topics which you'd like me to cover please do let me know via the comments, or alternatively drop me an email: [email protected]

Hope you have a lovely week! xxx

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