As the theme music to ‘Blind Date’ dies away, Cilla Black bounds onto stage, launching a new edition of the show. But this Cilla is 14 years old, sports an outrageous ginger wig, and is about to help her contestant not only to choose his date, but also design her features from scratch.

This remarkable scene forms the opening to ‘You're Not God You Know’, Wolsingham School's Science Centrestage play. The Science Centrestage project (see box below) encourages schools to use drama to explore issues surrounding biomedical research. Wolsingham School chose to take a provocative look at the issues raised by designer babies and human cloning.

For ten children aged 13-14 years from the school, in rural County Durham, the project began with a workshop at the Newcastle Centre for Life in October 2001. The morning was spent doing drama, the afternoon with discussions about biomedicine and starting work on a short play.

Schools taking part in Science Centrestage have adopted a wide variety of dramatic approaches. At Wolsingham, the pupils have had a very active role: "The children were particularly interested in the issues raised by ‘designer babies’ and by Dolly the sheep," says Simon Travers, the teacher supervising the production. "They also really liked the idea of basing the play around a gameshow, so we brought the two together for ‘You're Not God You Know’."

The lead protagonists in the play are contestant ‘Jean Poole’ and his date ‘Jeannette Icks’, played by 14-year olds Joe and Lilly. Rather than selecting a date from three different girls, as in the TV show, Jean picks out what features he would like Jeanette to have from a photofit. Having picked blue eyes, small nose and a ‘cute’ chin, Jean finds out that his date will be the spitting image of Britney Spears. He then travels off to the ‘genome factory’ in Paris, where Jeannette is to be built - and the process of cloning is explained to him, and to the audience, by two scientists.

In Paris, Jeanette/Britney is born from a pod, and the happy couple go on their date. But all is not well. Not only does Jean find out that the cloning procedures that made Jeanette also produced many defective Britney clones that died, but Jeanette herself has a faulty liver gene and suffers from premature ageing. By the time the couple return to see Cilla and discuss their date, Jeanette has turned yellow and is a tottering old lady crippled by arthritis.

When Wellcome News visited the school in February 2002, the play was still in development. "The kids haven’t decided on the outcome yet," said Simon. "In the storyline they’re working on at the moment, the Britney ‘date’ gets old too quickly - like Dolly the sheep - but the kids are researching and thinking about the good and bad things of cloning, so nothing is nailed down yet."

The play has already had an impact on the children’s understanding of the scientific issues - "Glen and Demi, who play the two scientists at the genome factory, can now tell you how to make a clone," says Simon - and on their confidence. "Chris was quite a shy lad to begin with," he says, "but he’s been practising with the radio mike and is now happy to stand up in front of an audience and do a marvellous rendition of the voice of ‘our Graham’ from ‘Blind Date’."

To help polish the play, the school was visited by actor teacher Deanna Johnson, who spent two hours working with the children, suggesting ideas and ways of improving the dramatic impact. "It’s bringing a different perspective," says Simon, "and it’s evident how enthusiastic the children are about the whole production".

Helping learning to stick

With a catchment area of 600 square miles, extending through farms, villages and small towns in the Wear Valley, the 900 children at Wolsingham School have a broad range of abilities and backgrounds. But all can benefit from activities such as Science Centrestage, argues Headteacher Mitch O’Reilly. "Children should find schoolwork interactive and exciting," she says. "If I think back to my own schooldays, it was the things that were different from the norm that caught my attention."

With little coverage of the social and ethical issues of biomedicine in the national curriculum, Mitch feels that activities such as Science Centrestage help to widen children’s horizons. "It's a brave move to deviate from the syllabus, but you could finish the whole syllabus and the children won’t have learned anything," she says. "So we’re always looking to find ways to reinforce learning, so that the children can assimilate information in the context of real life."

Deputy Head Paul Lamb agrees that drama can be a powerful way of teaching. "We’re particularly interested in ‘kinaesthetic learning’ - integrating movement and activity into children’s learning, rather than them just sitting in class looking and listening. And when we surveyed the children to ask what they preferred, these kinds of activities were by far the most popular. Drama can really help the learning to ‘stick’, and if we can get all the children involved we can raise standards across the curriculum."

See also

• Science Centrestage: Festival and scheme details

External links

• Wolsingham School and Community College: Further details