Why Are the Performing Arts Important for All Our Children?

A blog by Sara Berenguer, Assistant Head of Primary.

As part of the Nord Anglia family of schools, Regents International School Pattaya is the only school in the area to collaborate with the prestigious Juilliard School, based in New York, to deliver our unique Music, Drama and Dance programmes, now coming together under the umbrella of ‘Performing Arts”.  We seek to inspire and equip students with the skills, curiosity, and cultural literacy to engage with the performing arts throughout their lives because we know what benefits this kind of education offers children from a very young age:

• Confidence - All children are encouraged to perform in many different ways, starting with their peers in small groups and progressing to larger audiences.  The confidence that comes with performing in these different ways can be transformational.
• Resilience and growth mind-set - All Regents children are nurtured in giving and receiving feedback from a very early age.  The mentality of always seeking improvement and learning from mistakes is again, a life skill which Regents Lions learn right from the early years.
• Risk taking - Improvisation and the confidence to create are the ultimate risks in artistic terms. Doing so in a nurturing setting means that this comes naturally to our children now and in their future careers.
• Building trust and collaboration - The best teams in the worlds of art, sport and professional activity all have these shared attributes at their core. Becoming accountable to a group working towards the same goal provides invaluable life lessons.
• Critical thinking - A different way of looking at the world and a capacity to not always take things at face value are enriched when children are given opportunities to express themselves through the performing arts.
• Rich language - We at Regents understand that Drama, Dance and Music are powerful ways for students with EAL to be immersed in language that might not normally be within their reach. For English speakers, more abstract language is given meaning when used in these different artistic contexts.
• Cultural literacy - In an international community, it can be a challenge to find frames of reference that we share outside of those produced by popular culture factories such as Disney or YouTube. However, our performing arts programmes are nurturing children who will have a rich, shared frames of reference on which to build their understanding of the world around them.

With a growing understanding of the importance of performing arts, our emerging cross-curricular approach, known as ‘STEAM’ (Science, Technology, Engineering, Arts and Maths) demonstrates the importance of the Arts in the future success of our children. This is built upon yet another Nord Anglia collaboration, this time with MIT, to deliver a unique programme to inspire creativity, problem solving and ambitious learning. With recent research telling us that young people who participate in the arts are four times more likely to achieve academically, we are very proud to be in a school community that values the transformational power of performance.