It started with 'A Midsummer Night's Dream' at Westlea School in December 1997 and grew into a Shakespeare Festival with 500 children from four schools putting on The Tempest. Next Spring, thanks to a National Lottery Millennium Fund grant of £5,000, every West Swindon school and a few beyond will be performing one of the Bard's plays with the help of professional actors and Shakespeare teachers.

The project has also been selected as one of only ten flagship schemes in Britain sponsored by the Shakespeare Centre Millennium Link Project based in Stratford-upon-Avon.

"Festival 2000 is going to be a world first," said Swindon's Greendown School primary liaison teacher Tim Noble who is coordinating the festival.

"The lottery grant and to be selected as one of the Millennium Link Projects by the Shakespeare Centre are both significant breakthroughs. The local teachers are overflowing with ideas and enthusiasm, but we were being held back by a lack of resources to fund the professional support we need. We have now secured Chris Geelan and Sarah Gordon of the Young Shakespeare Company to work with us; others in education and theatre are showing great interest.

"We have found that children make amazing progress right across their education when tackling Shakespeare. They are able to grasp the difficult language and his concepts with amazing maturity, and it shows in their general approach to school."

The Shakespeare Festival still needs £25,000 to achieve its aims and Tim is making a renewed appeal to Swindon business to back a project winning world wide attention.

He can be can be contacted at Greendown on (01793) 874224 or via cceditor@cableinet.co.uk

All the world's a stage ... via www.swindonlink.com

The West Swindon Shakespeare Festival has featured on Swindon's web site for the last eight months and is linked with one of the sites run by a top Shakespeare teacher in the USA.

As a result of reading about the West Swindon project and seeing photographs on the site, Tim Noble has received e-mails from ten US schools.

"It is fantastically exciting," he said. "Now that all the schools are on-line, I'm hoping that children will be able to exchange e-mails with others in America about their Shakespeare studies. It's a new and unexpected dimension to the festival."