TiE Today in Wales, Author: Edward David Humphreys, University of Chester

development in TiE in Wales was very quick, as within the first ten years, there were
eight organisations representing each county who had defined their personal styles
and structures. It was noted by Gill Ogden, that Wales possessed “a sustained
provision of TiE… that was greater in scope than anything elsewhere in the UK”
(cited in Taylor, 1997, p51). Before the Education Reforms Act 1988, the companies
had much more freedom in what they did. For example, Cwmni Fran Wen were able
to produce Amaswn, which introduced infants to environmental issues and
communication within friendships in a non-verbal way.
The Educational Reforms Act 1988 (ERA) brought about whole new challenges for
TiE work. The “Thatcher years of the 1980’s, funding for Theatre in Education was
cut” (Cope, 2015). Prior to this, the ‘Black Papers’, started in the 1960s, recorded
how “schools have increasingly swung away from the notion… that education exists
to fit certain sorts of people for certain jobs” (Cox & Dyson, 1969, p6) and it was
clear that TiE had become involved in political debates. Those who supported the
shift in using drama as a way of educating, the Liberal Educationalists as labelled by
the Conservative wing of society, were being blamed for all “social and economic ills”
(Wooster, 2007, p30) and that this needed to be controlled. One major obstacle
which the ERA posed was the introduction of Local Management of Schools (LMS)
who shifted budgetary controls from Local Authorities to individual schools. Now that
the schools had control of the budgets, the onus was now on them to decide what
the money went into. Ultimately, this meant “there was no centralised, city-wide or
region-wide support for TiE companies” (Kleiman, 2013). TiE companies were
pushed further down the priorities of schools, who could not commission work for TiE
companies to produce. As a result of the LMS, many TiE companies simply stopped.
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