The dramatist can play a unique role in education. Yet why are so few laywrights involved through the Arts Council Writers in Schools scheme? Author Michael Fleming states in The Art of Drama Teaching: "Education in and through drama complement each other." But which schools educate students in dramatic art? Drama is still the Cinderella of the curriculum or a fashionable extra. Change is needed. Involving dramatists could bring fresh insight and enrichment.

One reason why drama as an art form is so powerful is that it takes place in the present. It's always now in drama. Pupils can learn from dramatists to think in a non-linear way and can discover that drama needn't conform to sequences of events similar to those in real life. Drama is not real life. The fact that drama is unreal is essential to the way it works as art and the full implications of this have not always been appreciated in drama teaching.

Fleming mentions approaches used by dramatists, for example "the play within the play" and the way "minor characters" are paradoxically brought closer to the original subject by being distanced through time and frame from it. "This can be illustrated by the thinking that underpins the `mantle of the expert' approach, also pioneered by Dorothy Heathcote," he states. "It has affinities with the notion of `minor characters' in that it takes an oblique approach to its subject matter."

In schools, the study of dramatic texts is often a sedentary process, confined to the English department. Action and improvisation, frequently excluding the exploration of texts, are considered to belong to drama. But a play is not just self-expression. While it's true that art cannot exist without self expression, not all self expression leads to art.

Remedial drama is an important, often neglected area. Drama in education can extend to the whole community, where a community play can be a unifying force but also needs to set standards of artistic merit. It's not simply a celebration by the participants - like a kindergarten Christmas play (not to decry the value of the latter.)

Drama has the power to make sense of and transcend real life. It is the work of dramatists to compose works that do this meaningfully. In second-level schools, drama is starting to creep into the curriculum. Let us involve the dramatist with the educational process not as some fancy extra but as a vital part of drama in education. Only then can the dramatist's art be employed in that field as an enriching power.

Author, dramatist and screenwriter living in Dublin