According to a recent Ofsted Report, a fifth of England’s secondary schools believe they have a problem with “gang culture.”

Ganging Up originally toured to children between the ages of 9 and 11 from schools in the Handsworth area of Birmingham and was commissioned by West Midlands police. In 2006 a second tour was mounted supported by West Midlands Police Safer Streets programme and Handsworth Association of Schools but this time touring to 12 and 13 year old pupils in local secondary schools.

Ganging Up is an ambitious theatre-in-education programme that looks at a complex issue. The story revolves around the relationships between Jay, his brother Corey and his best mate Jeavon and what happens when two of them become associated with a local gang. The programme seeks to provide a balance between what the children already know and have experienced, and what they could potentially encounter. It adopts a non-prescriptive stance, where it is the children who outline the consequences for the characters and generate the strategies by which to deal with the issues raised.

One of the strengths of Ganging Up is that it honestly addresses the many factors that can influence someone to join a gang. These include family loyalties, the perception that gang life is glamorous, fear, a need to belong and feel protected and a strong community culture of gang involvement. It provides an opportunity for such factors to be scrutinized and alternative courses of action to be explored. It is this very open-ended approach that allows the pupils to feel that they are not being preached to, but rather that the realities of their experiences are being represented and acknowledged.

Ganging Up supports pupils in developing a greater degree of self determination in relation to gangs and gang membership by:

• involving pupils in a compelling and realistic fictional context
• examining and challenging attitudes towards gang culture
• allowing pupils to identify where their choices lie with regard to becoming involved in gangs
• providing opportunities for pupils to practice strategies to resist peer influence and resolve conflict

The programme does not deal in simplistic decisions; rather it develops such skills, as a way of understanding and tackling the ‘shades of grey’ that make up this issue.