This year, the Shakespeare Schools Festival is set to reach more than 35,000 children, culminating in live performances in real theatre venues across the country. Susan Elkin explains

In 2008, the Royal Shakespeare Company (RSC) relaunched its far-reaching, far-sighted education work with a three-prong manifesto called Stand Up For Shakespeare.

It set out a way of engaging young people with Shakespeare and it is very simple. The RSC believes that you should start it earlier, do it on your feet and see it live.

Enter the charity, Shakespeare Schools Festival, which has been living the tenets of that manifesto since 2000 – eight years before it was published or thought of.

Since a modest beginning with eight schools in Wales, the scheme, which allows and supports teachers to, say, put on a Shakespeare play with under-10s or do Julius Caesar with a special needs group, or get those adolescent rebels busy with Macbeth, has reached more than 230,000 young people nationwide.

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