Pat Farrington, manager of the Writers in Schools Project in south Islington, London, explores how drama can support writing development.

"You can't just sit down and write a play, you have to do a bit of acting first."
Year 5 pupil

This goes straight to the heart of the model used by the Writers in Schools Project. Paul Herzberg, actor/playwright and writer-in-residence, explains the process to children before he starts: "We are going to create stories together, stories invented by you, developed by you and told by you in the form of a performance. You are the writers and the actors."

The writers try to take away the children's fear of the blank page by making the process fun, with drama games, improvisations and 'story storming' (a form of brainstorming). Writing ideas down becomes a way of recording good ideas for the plot, catch phrases and pieces of dialogue. It almost becomes "writing by stealth", and reluctant writers are often swept along, if necessary with a "scribe".

Drama-into-writing gives children time and opportunity to think creatively, build up their character, explore their ideas through improvisations and then create a script collectively for a final performance. Children work with a writer once a week for eight weeks, developing their ideas with the teacher in between sessions, to create a 30-minute play or linked episodes. The aim is for every child to learn and participate in this collective process at their own level.

The performance provides a deadline, purpose and audience for the children's work, which tends to concentrate their minds effectively. Sometimes, the children perform on a smaller scale, for example, short scripts in pairs in front of another class. Either way, the process is modelled on what happens in the outside world: the script must hold the attention of an audience.

A number of drama techniques are used in the project: 'hotseating' characters; forum theatre, where the children 'freeze' at a certain point and the teacher asks the audience how they would resolve the dramatic conflict; role play and group improvisations with topics such as 'being left out' or 'a lie'. These act as a creative stimulus and help children to express themselves more fluently. Some ideas may be recorded in writing for a playscript.

Bringing in professional writers from theatre, television and film means the project has been able to draw on innovative ideas, which have been adapted to help primary-age children develop their writing. For example, playwright/screenwriter Andy Walsh uses a character profile where the children each create a hero and a villain with an interesting twist: they have to say how their character wishes to be seen and how they are actually seen by other people.

From his experience working on soaps, Andy has introduced the technique of 'story storming', which results in a rich harvest of ideas from the children. These are then shaped into a 'storyline', a form of scaffolding within which he asks a series of questions that move the plot on. The answers that the children provide form the basis for the dialogue. This way, Andy knows that the plot will work, but he is still using the children's own ideas.

Some methods can be used by teachers themselves, for short drama sketches or 10-minute plays. Paul's advice to teachers is to start with a prose story based on discussion and improvisation: "Decide what your stories are going to be, break the class into groups of four or five, and get them to develop it … If a particular group comes unstuck, maybe revert to improvisation or invite suggestions from the rest of the class." Once the stories are fully developed, pupils can move from prose to the more formal layout of a script. Here, Paul recommends using a narrator to help move the story along. The play is then redrafted and consolidated at least two weeks before the performance.

The drama-into-writing-into-drama model gives many children the confidence they need to be able to write and perform. As one Year 5 child who worked with Paul said, after his class had written and performed four short plays about children's experience during the Second World War, "When we did our plays we had to make them up and learn the words and perform in front of loads of people and we had to do it all in five weeks and it was very hard but fun and I learnt how to write plays."

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