Our Work
Stories are made to be shared
Bright Torches works with children and young people from Early Years to secondary school, and with teachers and educators throughout their careers.
Our work brings story, talk and creative participation into learning — from first encounters with stories to Shakespeare workshops, teacher CPD and postgraduate teacher education.
Learning is richer when everyone has a part to play.
Where would you like to go?
Early Years
Long before children can read or write, they make sense of the world through stories, play and talk.
Our immersive Early Years projects invite children inside a story — becoming characters, making choices, sharing ideas and helping shape what happens next. We can also work with teachers and families, giving adults creative approaches they can continue using after the project.
Storytelling • Drama & play • Communication & language • Families
EARLY YEARS
Featured Project:
Pandora’s Box
An immersive storytelling project for Early Years children, teachers and families.
Beginning with the story of Pandora, children step inside an unfolding adventure — becoming characters, making choices, exploring language and helping to shape what happens next.
The project also brings teachers and families into the experience, sharing playful approaches to story and talk that can continue at school and at home.
Primary Schools
Bringing stories off the page and into the room.
Our Primary workshops use storytelling, drama, talk and play to make literature a shared experience. Children step into characters’ shoes, explore dilemmas, create scenes and discover language by speaking and playing with it.
The result is purposeful talk, reading and writing — while building confidence, imagination and the ability to listen and respond to others.
Shakespeare • Storytelling • Literacy • Oracy • Transition
Talk to us about your school →
Secondary Schools
Finding your voice. Finding your place.
We use rehearsal-room practice to make literature active. Students speak the language, inhabit characters, test interpretations and debate choices — developing personal responses grounded in the text.
From KS3 to GCSE and A Level, our workshops combine participation with rigorous textual exploration, helping students grow in confidence as readers, thinkers and contributors.
Shakespeare • Set texts • Literature • Oracy • Transition
Talk to us about your school →
By creating shared experiences across a new school community, our work supports belonging, relationships and positive engagement with school from the outset.
Because finding your voice also means discovering where you belong — and recognising that you have something to contribute.
KS3 & KS4 | Set texts | Shakespeare | GCSE support | Talk & oracy | Transition | Whole-year projects | Teacher development
We work with students across KS3–5 on Shakespeare, set texts and literature — from one-off workshops to longer projects — and offer practical CPD giving English departments rehearsal-room approaches they can continue using in their own classrooms.
Workshops and CPD for English departments
Teachers
Keeping creativity alive in the classroom
Teachers are at the heart of Bright Torches.
We work with teachers because the greatest impact of a creative experience isn’t simply what happens while we’re in the room. It’s what teachers feel able to do differently afterwards.
Our professional development draws on rehearsal-room practice, storytelling and active approaches to literature. Sessions are practical: teachers experience strategies themselves, explore how they might work with their own students and leave with approaches they can use immediately.
We help teachers create classrooms characterised by purposeful talk and active participation, where more young people are engaged in making meaning rather than waiting to be given an answer.
But our work is about more than providing a toolkit.
We want to remind teachers of their own creativity, their love of stories and the pleasure of discovering ideas alongside young people. We help build the confidence and resilience to collaborate with students: to create classrooms where young people can question, interpret, disagree, contribute and surprise us — and where those contributions are celebrated.
CPD can support a particular text or curriculum area, introduce a department to active approaches to literature, accompany student workshops or form part of a longer-term partnership.
English CPD | Shakespeare | Set-text CPD | Active literature | Oracy & talk | Bespoke departmental development
Working with the teachers of tomorrow
Universities & Teacher Education
Our relationship with teachers often begins before they have their own classroom.
Bright Torches works with universities and Initial Teacher Education providers to give trainee teachers direct experience of creative, participatory approaches to learning.
We invite teachers at the beginning of their careers to experience the classroom differently: to explore what happens when pupils are trusted with challenging ideas, when talk becomes genuinely exploratory and when literature becomes something a class makes meaning from together.
Our work can form part of Primary and Secondary teacher education, subject-specific Shakespeare or literature training, university courses and wider professional learning.
By working with teachers at the beginning of their careers as well as experienced practitioners, we can help creative practice travel much further than any single Bright Torches workshop ever could.
Initial Teacher Education | PGCE | Primary | Secondary English | University partnerships | Conferences
International
Stories cross borders
Bright Torches works with schools, teachers, universities and education partners internationally, adapting our approach to different curricula, communities and contexts.
Our international partnerships often combine direct work with young people and sustained professional development for teachers. Rather than importing a fixed model, we work collaboratively with local educators, sharing approaches, learning from one another and developing practice that can continue after our visit.
The context may change, but the principles don’t: engagement, talk, participation and the shared experience of story.
Because stories give us a place to meet, exchange ideas and learn from one another.
Student workshops | Teacher development | University partnerships | Conferences | Sustained partnerships
Bringing the rehearsal room into the classroom
Shakespeare
Shakespeare’s plays weren’t written simply to be read. They were written to be spoken, heard, questioned and performed.
Bright Torches brings deep professional experience of Shakespeare in performance together with years of experience working with children, young people, teachers and trainee teachers.
Our workshops invite students to work as actors do: speaking the language, exploring character and relationships, testing different interpretations, making physical and vocal choices and asking what those choices reveal about the text.
Performance doesn’t replace textual understanding. It becomes a route into it.
Students encounter challenging language by doing something with it. They investigate motivation, subtext, power, rhetoric and character; listen to one another; justify their choices; and discover that interpretation can be thoughtful, personal and collaborative.
We work across the Shakespeare journey, from playful first encounters in primary school, through KS3, to focused support for GCSE and A-Level set texts. We also work extensively with teachers and trainee teachers, sharing practical rehearsal-room approaches they can continue using in their own classrooms.
Primary Shakespeare | KS3 Shakespeare | GCSE Shakespeare | A-Level Shakespeare
Macbeth | Romeo and Juliet | A Midsummer Night’s Dream | The Tempest | Hamlet | King Lear | Othello | Twelfth Night | Much Ado About Nothing
Shakespeare CPD | Initial Teacher Education
SECONDARY
Featured Project:
The Merry Wanderers
A creative transition project built around A Midsummer Night’s Dream.
Merry Wanderers brings a new Year 7 community together through a shared encounter with Shakespeare. Students explore the play through talk, performance and rehearsal-room practice, building relationships, confidence and a sense of belonging as they begin secondary school.
Alongside the student work, Bright Torches works with teachers to develop creative approaches that can continue beyond the project.
Let’s create something together
There isn’t a single Bright Torches package.
Sometimes a school needs an inspiring workshop around a particular set text. Sometimes a department wants practical CPD. Sometimes the starting point is a challenge around engagement, talk, transition, literacy, confidence or belonging. And sometimes a partnership grows into something none of us could have designed alone.
We begin by listening.
Tell us about your young people, your teachers and what you’re hoping to achieve, and we’ll explore what Bright Torches could bring to the table.