Many years ago, I took my parents to see a Shakespeare play: The Merchant of Venice by the Royal Shakespeare Company. It was 1987 and Antony Sher was electric as Shylock.

Portia was halfway through her “Quality of mercy” speech when my father decided to join in. From the back of the Stratford gods came his voice, echoing the words he’d known since school. I was mortified.
Now I see it differently. Shakespeare’s words weren’t just in my dad’s head - they were in his bloodstream.

That’s what we want our young people’s experience of school Shakespeare to be about: getting these plays under their skin.

It’s one of the reasons why I was pleased to see that, in its response to the recent curriculum and assessment review, the Department for Education agreed with review leader Becky Francis’ recommendation that students should “continue to study our rich literary heritage”, including the works of Shakespeare.

Four hundred years after he was writing, Shakespeare continues to hold a singular place in our national psyche. Around 2 million students in England and Wales study his plays every year, and, astonishingly, about half the world’s schoolchildren encounter him at some point in their education.

Yet, for many, that experience feels less like discovery and more like drudgery. For every student who finds a spark in Romeo and Juliet or Macbeth, there’s another staring blankly at a page of “thees” and “thous,” wondering why on earth they’re still doing this.

Teaching Shakespeare in schools

Why? Because Shakespeare wrote for performance, not for silent reading.

Imagine reading a screenplay and never seeing the film. That’s how most young people first meet Shakespeare: sitting at a desk, decoding lines written over 400 years ago.

But lift those words off the page - speak them, move with them, play with them - and everything changes. Suddenly students aren’t just studying Shakespeare; they’re performing him. They’re connecting.

The curriculum and assessment review might have cemented Shakespeare’s place in classrooms, but there is still work to be done around making his works feel accessible to all students.

The Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) advocates a rehearsal-based approach to learning: getting pupils out of their chairs and into the action. It’s creative, collaborative and wonderfully inclusive - transforming classrooms into rehearsal rooms where every student can find their voice.

When young people “crack” Shakespeare in this way, two powerful things happen.

First, their sense of what they’re capable of shifts. The “I can do Shakespeare; I can do anything” effect kicks in.

Second, their confidence with language soars. Shakespeare’s complex, playful words become a workout for the brain - stretching vocabulary, sharpening expression and improving writing skills.

When this approach is taken, the results speak for themselves. The RSC’s Time to Act study found that students taught through active, rehearsal-based methods showed a 19 per cent improvement in language development, producing longer, more sophisticated writing with richer vocabulary.

Shakespeare curriculum

It’s an approach that can work for everyone, and today the RSC is launching a new tool to help all schools to teach Shakespeare in this way.

The RSC Shakespeare Curriculum is an easy-to-use online platform that allows teachers and students to explore on-demand productions, rehearsal clips, lesson plans and state-of-the-art digital tools that make Shakespeare accessible, exciting and alive. It’s funded by The Foyle Foundation and is free for all UK state secondary schools and special schools, with a paid option available for others.

The platform launches with Macbeth, with Romeo and Juliet arriving in spring 2026. Two new plays will be added every academic year. By 2029 the hope is that 80 per cent of all UK secondary schools will be using the Shakespeare Curriculum. In the longer term, there are also plans to roll it out internationally.

The platform helps to support the rehearsal-based techniques that we know not only boost pupils’ understanding but also feed into wider curriculum recommendations around oracy and the value of teaching the spoken word.

Creative arts education isn’t a luxury; it’s a lifeline. And keeping Shakespeare on the curriculum isn’t about nostalgia; it’s about relevance.

His plays grapple with timeless questions of justice, power, identity, love and loss - themes that help young people make sense of themselves and the world. They open up conversations about gender, race, class and empathy. They teach us how to listen and how to speak.

But those lessons can’t just live on the page; they need to live in voices, in movement, in the confidence of young people finding their place in the world. It isn’t just about teaching the Bard. It’s about giving students the tools to think, to express, to create and to lead.

Geoff Barton is a former English teacher, headteacher and general secretary of the Association of School and College Leaders. He was chair of the Commission on the Future of Oracy Education in England

The RSC Shakespeare Curriculum is now live and can be found here.

You can now get the UK’s most-trusted source of education news in a mobile app. Get Tes magazine on iOS and on Android