What We Do

TEAM Educational Theatre Company is Ireland’s longest established Theatre-in-Education Company and has earned national acclaim over the last thirty-three years working within the Primary and Post Primary system serving up to 140 schools in the state every year. Over the years TEAM’s work has been influenced and driven by some of the key thinkers in the areas of education and children’s and young people’s arts in Ireland – Professor John Coulihan, Dr. Concepta Conaty and John McArdle.

TEAM’s core staff work with professional actors and writers to create interactive educational theatre in the pupils’ own learning environment – their school. The theatre TEAM makes is based on a specially commissioned script, and is designed to offer a true theatre experience, pitched to suit the pupils’ needs with significant opportunities for learning at the heart of every programme. A large part of TEAM’s work in developing a TEAM programme is to link the themes and situations of the plays, workshops and resource materials with specific objectives of the curricula at both primary and post-primary level. We have collaborated with some of Ireland's best-known writers, including Frank McGuinness, Bernard Farrell, Maeve Ingoldsby and Michael West to create dramatic contexts that reflect the contemporary concerns and values of Irish children.

• We produce two programmes per year, one for Primary and one for Post Primary schools, all of which have an educational question at their heart, and require the students' active involvement in seeking to address that question.
• We present, for the most part, original plays by Irish writers especially developed to focus on the needs and interests of contemporary Irish students from age 4 to 18.
• We provide models of classroom drama practice that can be used by teachers to complement the everyday educational needs of their students.
• We promote students' engagement with the arts both as interpreters of high quality professional theatre and as makers of their own dramatic worlds.
• We offer a supportive and properly resourced environment for actors and other artists to develop their skills as partners in children's creative development.
• We facilitate the implementation of specific educational initiatives, particularly those involving disadvantaged pupils, by developing models of practice designed to meet the challenges inherent in such work.

"TEAM sticks pins in the bubbles of assumption and forces young people to become aware of themselves and others."
Writer John McArdle.