Noise Solution and Arts Award transforming the lives of young people

This week on the blog we have a guest post from Simon Glenister, Founder and Director of Arts Award centre Noise Solution. Simon shares with us how they deliver Arts Award and enable their young people to reinvent themselves.

Noise Solution pair professional musicians with young people facing challenging circumstances. Tasked with making people successful at creating the music they value, we capture and share young people’s achievements by making drum and bass, trance, Trap, Dubstep, Rock or cinematic film scores using a blog or a ‘positive digital narrative’. It is the quick mastery of a skill, combined with the easy and targeted sharing of success with the people whose opinions really matter to them that is allowing our young people to reinvent themselves in a positive light. It’s an approach that a year-long cabinet office funded external impact evaluation recently found to be ‘statistically significant’ in impacting on young people’s wellbeing.

We are also able to use this digital narrative to enable our young people to create the evidence required for achieving an Arts Award. We think Arts Award is fantastic! The flexibility of the Arts Award framework allows us to be totally young-person-focussed and it provides a great structure for us to work around. Young people value the fact that Arts Award is a national qualification, meaning it can be used to contribute towards them gaining a place at college.

In 2016, 69% of our young people worked towards an Arts Award and 88% of them successfully achieved this. These are young people who have struggled to engage with mainstream education or statutory services.

Noise Solution offers the opportunity for young people to take part in Arts Award at Bronze, Silver or Gold levels. Since inception, 65 participants have achieved an Arts Award - the majority of these being at Bronze. Each young person’s portfolio is in the form of their own Arts Award blog. For Noise Solution, the impact of young people achieving a nationally recognised qualification is important as so many of them have often previously been told they are failing.

The focus of our Arts Award delivery is to help young people excel in something that they are interested in. Their family members and carers have also noted the impact of Arts Award. As a family member noted:

“A engages well with 1-2-1. With Noise Solution and with A’s creative side, he has shown how he can escape and focus in a positive light. A has a great interest in IT and has loved every minute of Noise Solution.” 

Another family member said:

“B came out buzzing every week. Getting her there was sometimes difficult as she struggles to get out of bed but when she comes out she is buzzing, excited and happy. It’s important that she is doing something that is her interest, which makes a big difference.”

If you’re interested in finding more out about Noise Solution, head to their website or email them on info@noisesolution.org.