The Regent has always hosted drama and dance classes, but we are looking to expand our educational role over the coming year or two, and more details will be available early next year. We are currently  doing our best to find out from our education partners and our existing customers exactly how they would like this to work best. We are also working to develop educational activities to support our programme and the National Curriculum.

Our draft aims for the Regent Education Programme are:

• To work with local full-time and part-time education partners (drama and theatre schools, secondary schools) to offer their students high quality nationally recognised qualifications in the performing arts.
• To work with partners and funders to offer high quality creative projects, such as the recently started Mediabox project 'Dreamwalkers' which will create a film (DVD, online and available on mobile phone) expressing the aspirations of local young people.
• To create a 'training' theatre company at the Regent Centre open (by audition/interview) to anyone between the ages of 18-90 to include performing arts or technical theatre workshops and classes and rehearsals for full productions, leading to a nationally recognised qualification.
• To offer a range of arts, crafts and performance based workshops and courses to the general public, some of them  leading to nationally accredited certificates
• To offer regional businesses the opportunity of attending drama/simulation/role play-based staff development programmes to help them with customer service, management and strategic planning skills.
• To offer complementary educational activities to our programme, where appropriate and possible.

We are currently planning our first in-house Shakespeare production: Twelfth Night - which will be performed at the Centre 10th-13th February 2010, and will offer in-house or visiting workshops, teachers' packs, and special school matinee performances. The 'Dreamwalkers' film project will be completed at the end of February, 2009, and screened at the Regent Centre on 4th March.