At the RSC, we have a Youth Advisory Board who support us to better understand and meet the needs of young people.
The Youth Advisory Board (YAB) began in 2019 and is made up of young people from our Associate Schools across the country who all want to make young voices heard in the arts.
YAB members are currently aged between 13-22 and made up of different genders and ethnicities. One of their main priorities is ensuring access and inclusion in the arts for everyone. A key focus is extending representation in the curriculum – ensuring that young people in schools are able to study works of literature by a diverse range of writers.
Over the summer of 2025, the YAB are producing audio resources responding to the characters and themes of Fat Ham - discussing the play’s relationship to Hamlet, whilst advocating for the text to be studied more widely in KS4 classrooms.
Their work is inspired by the Lit in Colour campaign, a project launched by Penguin Books UK, alongside race equality think tank The Runnymede Trust, and including Bloomsbury Publishing , which aims to support schools to introduce texts by writers from an ethnically diverse background. The resources created by the YAB aim to support teachers to choose to teach Fat Ham*.
*Fat Ham sits on Bloomsbury’s 2024 KS4 reading list.
