News Speak Up Celebration 2025

On Wednesday 2 July, young people across Doncaster held a building wide celebration as part of the National Theatre Speak Up Festival.  

Over the past three years, students from five secondary schools across Doncaster have been taking part in the Speak Up programme in partnership with The National Theatre. Speak Up is a secondary school programme that sees young people working in collaboration with local artists and teachers to co-create artistic responses to issues that are most important to them. The programme encourages new ways for young people to think, see and bring about change, whilst helping participants to develop self-expression, wellbeing and personal skills. 

The young people from Hall Cross Academy, The McAuley Catholic High School, Don Valley Academy, De Warenne Academy and Doncaster School for the Deaf took over Cast as well as DGLAM to showcase the work they had created this year as well as to celebrate the Speak Up programme as a whole, which comes to an end with this this academic year. Students created an immersive theatre piece, graffiti art, textile, music, spoken word and dance.  

Students from Don Valley researched their heritage in Doncaster, to devise an immersive theatre piece telling the lost tales of Doncaster including witch trials in Rossington, Dutch evacuees who came to Warmsworth and the horrific Flying Scotsman crash in 1947. 

Doncaster School for the Deaf created an archive instillation of the school’s three-year Speak Up journey. The pupils explored what it truly means to be Deaf, expressing frustration, joy, pride, and the challenges of discrimination through Dance, Drama, Fine Art, Film, Animation, Music, Poetry, and Printmaking. 

Hall Cross Academy created a drama piece about the stereotypes we impose on ourselves and others and how to redefine how we are seen by our peers.  

De Warenne created a community space with an exhibition of graffiti boards, buskers, plein-air painters and a mini flash mob all to explore the theme of why art should be everywhere. 

McAuley Catholic High School’s project was showcased at DGLAM and was a collection of visual art, poetry, and music to create a powerful expression of what the students wanted to speak up about in the world around them.   

“In our sessions we’ve been talking about mental health... we’ve just been coming together and getting ideas about what we should do – it’s important because it makes me stand out of my shell and get people to talk to.” - student from Hall Cross Academy   

“I truly believe it’s important we have people’s voices heard as you can get the message across, and the conversations we have, because you can let stuff out and you can let people know how you feel, because it just makes you feel better” - student from Hall Cross Academy  

From 2022 to 2025 Speak Up has engaged with 140,000 young people in 55 selected secondary schools nationwide. The Theatre Nation Partnership areas taking part in Speak Up include Doncaster, Greater Manchester, Leicester, North Devon, Outer East London and South Essex, Stoke-on-Trent, Sunderland, Wakefield and Wolverhampton.