The why, what, where and whom of MakeBelieve Arts

MakeBelieve Arts is a theatre and education charity, offering innovative, high quality programmes to develop the holistic, creative, emotional and cognitive potential of children and young people from Early Years settings and Primary Schools across the UK.

MakeBelieve Arts believes that every child is unique, and their voices deserve to be heard, valued and celebrated. Our mission is to create language-rich environments, where young children are free to explore their creativity and to make up and act out their own stories, without adults feeling the need to shape these.

Through Helicopter Stories and the Poetry Basket and Story Basket programmes, we motivate 2 to 7-year-olds to engage confidently in communication, exciting them about the rhythm and rhyme of language and letting them know they are capable and have a story to share.

We encourage the development of oral storytelling skills and a love of poetry, as well as supporting young children to pick up a pen and have a go at writing on their own.

Helicopter Stories has been shown to develop an understanding of the link between the spoken and the written word, a vital first step in emergent literacy.

One Reception classroom we worked with, went from 24% of children expected to achieve age-related levels in writing, to 76% achieving this. This result, coupled with a rise from the predicted 41% to a staggering 82% of the class reaching age-related expectations in speaking, demonstrates the potential of this child-centred approach.

As a charity, we believe in supporting teachers to develop their skills as reflective practitioners. Alongside this, we must engage parents and grandparents, encouraging them to see the benefits of our approach, and enlisting them to share poems and listen to their children’s stories at home. 

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MakeBelieve Arts is a theatre and education charity working with children aged 2 to 7. Since 2002, we have pioneered the work of Vivian Gussin Paley, delivering child-centred approaches to communication, language development, and early literacy. Although we are a small team, we deliver our work through a unique mix of freelancers, school-based Helicopter Stories Champions and core staff. MakeBelieve Arts is governed by a Board of Directors who are also Trustees of the Charity, each chosen because of their specialist knowledge.  We have a dedicated core team of three plus our Creative Associates, a pool of freelance artists and workshop leaders who deliver our artistic programme.  

We are a Restorative Approaches company and a member of the Independent Theatre Company (ITC

Our in-class sessions and teacher training focus on enabling young children to develop their skills as independent creative thinkers who are curious and resilient storytellers. Our patron is Michael Rosen and, until her death in July 2019, Vivian Gussin Paley.

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In 1999, Artistic Director Trisha Lee read The Boy Who Would Be a Helicopter by Vivian Gussin Paley and began incorporating Storytelling and Story Acting into her work. Seeing Vivian in action, in 2001, Trisha was surprised. Vivian’s approach was more child-centred than Trisha’s directive, theatre-based version. Inspired to change her practice, Trisha brought Helicopter Stories to the UK and developed a one-day programme of teacher training to disseminate the approach.

MakeBelieve Arts was founded in 2002, with Vivian as our patron. In March 2004 MakeBelieve Arts was registered as a Company Limited by Guarantee, and in March 2006, the organisation became a Registered Charity.

From 2007 - 10, Trisha Lee was a Cabinet Office appointed Social Enterprise Ambassador, to promote the growth of social enterprises nationally and is particularly interested in how the Arts can flourish as social enterprises.

In 2013, Esmee Fairbairn funded a research report by the Open University which saw MakeBelieve Arts establish four licensed Centres of Excellence. One of these is a Special School, where we developed a way of delivering Helicopter Stories for children with special needs. 

From 2015, we have focused almost entirely on the Early Years. Funding from Ironmongers Foundation allowed us to track two classes of children from the start of Reception until they reached Year 2. Smaller pockets of funding from Chippenham Borough Lands Charity meant that in Wiltshire, we delivered sessions to children from a feeder preschool and a year later followed some of those children into Reception. In 2016 Artistic Director, Trisha Lee was commissioned to write a bestselling how-to publication about Helicopter Stories, which was shortlisted for the UKLA Academic Book of the Year 

In 2017, MakeBelieve Arts was awarded Explore and Test funding to examine the impact of our work on communication and early literacy. 

In 2018, we created the Helicopter Stories blog site. Here, teachers share their experiences via our guest blog. The site has had over 26,000 visitors. We are currently building an online memorial to Vivian Gussin Paley that will be visited by teachers across the globe.

In September 2019, MakeBelieve Arts released The Poetry Basket, a web-based programme consisting of thirty-six videos of poems with actions for teachers to share with their children.

In 2020 during the COVID pandemic and having all face-to-face training shut down MakeBelieve Arts produced Helicopter Stories On Demand, an in-depth online training course for the Helicopter Stories approach. We also released The Story Basket, which contains 15 audio-only fairy tales and folktales, accompanied by music and sound to bring these magical stories to life. Both are accompanied by resources. Our sister site www.helicopterstories was also launched.

In 2021 we launched our ‘Expanding Our Reach’ programme funded by The Paul Hamlyn Foundation and Croydon and North Somerset Early Years to embed Helicopter Stories in schools and settings in those boroughs.

In 2022 The poetry Basket 2 was launched with 36 new online poems on six new topics and added new stories to The Story Basket.

In 2023 Helicopter Stories at Home went live, a programme made to help teachers and parents in using Helicopter Stories in their homes.

The Benefits of Creative Education

“Imaginative activity fashioned so as to produce outcomes that are both original and of value.

— National Advisory Committee on Creativity and Cultural Education led by Sir Ken Robinson in 'All Our Futures; Creativity, Culture & Education', 1998.

MakeBelieve Arts puts this definition into practice through our narrative based programmes that are designed to support children and young people in developing their skills as creative thinkers.

Sir Ken Robinson argues that education has three core purposes...

• economic – to support children in becoming economically independent, and being able to enter an increasingly complex workplace.

• cultural – to support children understand where their values have come from and to explore and understand shared values and cultural complexity.

• personal – to support individuals to perceive the value of their education and to invest them in the process of  their learning.

Life in the 21st Century  is increasingly complex. In a recent IBM survey of the challenges faced within the workplace, 3,000 CEOs identified three key priorities.

1. Dealing with complexity.

2. Adapting to a rapidly changing environment.

3. Thinking creatively and innovatively.

Through creative education MakeBelieve Arts believes that we can fundamentally change the way children engage with learning, allowing them to develop their abilities to deal with an increasingly complex world, to become more adaptable and able to think creatively and innovatively in an environment that is rapidly changing.  A creative education enables children to realise their strengths and achieve their full potential.

“The fact is that given the challenges we face, education doesn’t need to be reformed, it needs to be transformed. The key to this transformation is not to standardise education but to personalize it, to build achievement on discovering the individual talents of each child, to put students in an environment where they want to learn and where they can naturally discover their true passions.

— Ken Robinson, The Element: How Finding Your Passion Changes Everything

Promoting an environment of creativity

MakeBelieve Arts believes that promoting an environment of creativity and supporting all children to develop their creative abilities must start at the earliest opportunity, hence our work in the Early Years through our Helicopter Stories curriculum.

Registered Company Number:  5087027

Registered Charity Number:  1113312