In this piece of writing, I respond to Anon's reflections on her/his experiences of being taught Drama in a British high school, recently published in this journal (see Anon. 2017. '"Where the wild things are" -- an insider's experience of the contemporary drama classroom', RIDE: "The Journal of Applied Theatre and Performance", 22:2, 216-219). As a Drama teacher working in UK education for 13 years, I empathised with the teacher in Anon's account of the drama classroom. In order to provide a contextualisation of UK arts education that form the broader landscape of Anon's account, I reflect on the pressures of drama teaching in the contemporary classroom partly created by the UK government's marginalisation of arts subjects in schools.