For the past two weeks students and staff at King’s Hawthornes have been creating and performing beautiful monologues sharing with our community their hopes, fears and experiences of the current lockdown. The deadline for entries was Friday 8th May and today it has been announced that Kath Thompson will be the official adjudicator and a winner will be announced later today.

Kath Thompson was the previous director and founder of Merseyside Youth Associations’ Now Festival – a young people’s performance festival focused on mental health and wellbeing. Kath has worked in creative arts for the past 23 years, working as a drama and creative arts teacher both in the UK and South Africa, founding two youth theatre companies, directing numerous performances and herself being a dancer and performer using theatre in education to tackle issues with young people.

In recent years, aside from working on the Now Festival, Kath has worked with Liverpool’s First Take Film company to produce several films around youth mental health. She has also taken on acting roles in some of these.

Kath is passionate about seeing young people use their creative voices to create positive and lasting change. In her current role working for Liverpool Learning Partnership she is working across all Liverpool schools to improve young people’s access to mental health support.

So keep an eye on our social media pages today to find out who has won our #LockdownMonologue competition and a £25 Liverpool One voucher.