Spotlight on... The Roundhouse

Our friends at the Roundhouse in Camden, London have just announced their programme of summer holiday activities for 11-25 year olds, and we wanted to highlight some of the work they do to support young artists develop their skills and achieve an Arts Award, as well as their tips for delivering the awards in projects with young people who aren’t in education, employment or training.

As an Arts Award centre and Supporter, The Roundhouse runs Arts Award drop-in sessions for young people to find out more about the awards and use the facilities and opportunities available.  As usual, this summer there’s a pretty impressive array of activities to choose from, from street circus to music production to freerunning and more besides. Take a look at the full programme here.

They also run more intensive training programmes for young people not currently in education, employment or training, to give them hands-on industry experience, including this summer’s Bloomberg Broadcast Programme here.

Working with young people not in education, employment or training

Another of the Roundhouse’s projects to equip young people with industry skills to get them back into work, training or employment, is the OnTrack programme which has been running for the last two years. OnTrack gives young people the opportunity to work alongside professionals, create original music, produce a live event, and achieve a Bronze Arts Award.

Delivering Arts Award alongside projects like this enables young people to simultaneously accredit their work experience and adds value to the project, which can be added to their CV alongside the skills they’ve developed through taking part.

As part of the evaluation of last year’s OnTrack programme, the Roundhouse developed a set of tips and suggestions for delivering the awards alongside hands-on, industry-based projects with young people not in education, employment and training. You can download the resource in full from the Arts Award adviser hub, and here’s a quick round up of some of their top tips:

• Harness young people’s arts interests: The awards is framework is flexible for a reason – it can be done in any art form, allowing young people to explore their own arts interests and strengths. Empower young people to explore their own arts path.
• Explore creative ways to collect evidence: Arts Award is a qualification, but it may not look or feel like a qualification that young people who are disengaged with education have done before. Evidence for portfolios can pretty much be collected in any format, as long as it meets the evidence requirements in the toolkit.
• Weave the awards into your programme: This way, Arts Award will be an integral part of the programme, encouraging reflection, skills development and evidence collection throughout. If Arts Award activity is woven into the programme from the start, it won’t seem like an “add on”, and will save young people (and you) rushing to collect evidence at the end.
• Maximise opportunities to develop employability skills: Arts Award encourages the development of all kinds of transferrable skills such as teamworking, planning, communication, budgeting, leadership and marketing. If your project is focused on employability, make the most of this. More ideas about how to do this are suggested in the resource.