Build your child's reading confidence at home with books at the right level Stumbling upon a hidden and forgotten garden, three young friends find themselves transported to World War One, and caught up in the shocking truth of young soldiers sent to fight for their country. Beautifully illustrated by Kate Greenaway winner Michael Foreman, this thought-provoking play helps to bring the First World War into modern day. Diamond/Band 17 books offer more complex, underlying themes to give opportunities for children to understand causes and points of view. A playscript Curriculum Links: History: What was it like to live here in the past? This book has been quizzed for Accelerated Reader.

One night, an off-duty police officer and a woman carrying a cat box meet on Beachy Head. Two disparate souls collide, and learn what it truly means to be touched by the magic of hope. Philip Osment’s final play, Can I Help You? is a magical realist examination of the role race and gender have to play in mental health and suicide.

What happens when you're in a hole? What happens when that hole's inside you? What do you do you fill it with to make yourself feel whole? Last year, 3 teenagers emailed the 20 Stories High Theatre Company to ask them if they could make a play about their friend Holly. This is how it unravelled... 3 teenagers: ...So that's our story and we really want to tell it... and we want to act in it as well, and play ourselves... cos actors wouldn't really be as convincing as us... 20 Stories High: It's a very moving story... but we're really busy at the moment and also, to be honest, you're not really actors. 3 teenagers: But we really want to tell our story... it says on your website that "Everybody has a story to tell... and their own way of telling it..." 20 Stories High: ...well, come back in a year, when we're less busy, and let's talk... One Year Later... We made the play with them... WHOLE Winner of the Writers' Guild Award for Theatre Play for Young People 2013.

Looking for relief from boredom, seven young fathers in prison sign-up for an education program. They try to use the workshops to settle scores and to rise up the prison pecking order. But they're confronted with more than they'd bargained for, as they face up to their relationships with their children and and their own fathers.

A modern re-imagining of Hans Christian Anderson's tale, The Ugly Duckling.

Four plays for audiences and casts of 14+. They deal with issues of gender, AIDS, disability, relationships with parents, ethnic strife, crime, drugs and bullying.

Philip Osment's magical play is funny, tender and true. Gabriel has to earn his stripes as a guardian angel to a poor orphaned girl as she grows up with her adoptive parents. Along the way he learns things about his own history and the real reason for his growing friendship with the little girl. Astonishing theatrical skills, including puppetry, live music and song combine to create this wondrous adventure, an unforgettable exploration of the joys and heartaches of living and loving. A family show for audiences of 6+, Little Violet and the Angel won the Peggy Ramsay Award and toured in the spring of 2001.

Award-winning playwright Philip Osment's sad, touching and sometimes comic story of five friends who journey into the Irish countryside to scatter the ashes of a friend who died of AIDS.

1988. THATCHER'S BRITAIN. Seventeen-year-old Luke runs away to London - away from homophobic playground slurs, headlines that scream 'Don't Teach Our Children To Be Gay' and a family who wouldn't understand him - to Uncle Martin, who he once saw with his arms around another man at a march. In the capital, Mark is sacked because of fears about colleagues working with 'someone like him'. His boyfriend, Selwyn, faces being beaten up both by the police and at home by his own stepbrother. Meanwhile, Debbie battles with her son, who doesn't want to live with her and her girlfriend. And retired piano teacher Miss Rosenblum - who once found refuge in this country from a terror that swept away half her family in 1930s Vienna - has seen this sort of hatred and fear before. Soon, these individual stories - of first loves and old flames, alliances and abandonment, missed opportunities and new chances - intertwine to paint a vivid picture of Eighties Britain. This Island's Mine was originally performed by Gay Sweatshop in 1988. Now, three decades after the introduction of Section 28 banning positive representations of homosexuality, Philip Osment's passionate and lyrical play, of outsiders, exiles and refugees, is all too resonant.

On a dilapidated British farm in 1963, Morley is coping with puberty, the tangles of love within his family, and the desertion of his mother. He is attracted to Andy, one of the Scottish hitchhikers who have sought shelter at the farm. All is not, however, as it seems in this powerful play by the author of Flesh and Blood and The Dearly Beloved. Morley's habit of telling tales about his elders hastens a crisis.5 men

Three 30 minute plays by leading playwrights for children to act, commissioned by the Unicorn, one of the world's foremost companies creating theatre with young people at its core. Premiered as end of year performances by primary classes, the scripts are ideal school productions or for younger youth theatre groups. They are designed to be directed by teachers or youth leaders with no previous drama training. The book includes advice and ideas to support preparation, rehearsal and production.

A play combining fantasy and realism about two children coping with their mother's depression and learning how to overcome their own fears. The Palace of Fear was developed in primary schools and will tour Leicester schools in the Autumn term.

When a successful London television producer returns to his rural hometown, his arrival heralds suffering and domestic turmoil in this sensitive and compelling depiction of varying family relationships.-4 men

Hearing Things explores the dilemmas of psychiatry from the points of view of patients, relatives and staff. Based on experiences of psychiatrists and patients, the 'healthy' and the 'ill', the play examines how and if people heal and recover inside institutions. As part of the research process, staff and patients at Homerton University Hospital and the Maudsley Hospital in south London took part in drama programmes creating characters and improvising scenes , with clinicians and those receiving treatment swapping roles. Using a unique collaborative process between patients, psychiatrists and mental health staff, Playing ON Theatre Company drew together the stories of those receiving and providing mental health care culminating in performances at the hospitals and in theatre spaces. At the Maudsley, as a result of taking part, two patient's progress was so great that doctors allowed their early discharge. The script of Hearing Things was informed by these workshop programmes and by the participants.