Continuing our celebration of community projects on the blog this month, Victoria Harrocks, Community Arts Coordinator at Trinity Champion Centre, Formby High School in Liverpool tells us about the various community projects their pupils are involved in as part of their Arts Award projects enabling them to experience unique performance opportunities, see live events and work with industry professionals.
As part of my role, I support our school and local community by developing activities to engage in creativity and culture. I have been teaching Arts Award for ten years and during this time, I have developed strong community links and created many diverse arts events to deliver Arts Award in our school. Our mission is to keep the arts alive, despite challenges and our motto is, ‘Everyone's an artist’.
Formby High is a great school with a vibrant local community. In many ways, we’re still a traditional secondary school in a leafy village north of Liverpool. However, we struggle with our ageing facilities and capacity which inevitably means we often outsource our events to other venues and therefore students can experience arts opportunities in a variety of arts settings. We have taken this as an opportunity to think in a more ‘site specific’ way and get creative with our venues, for example our Musical Theatre Company performed ‘Matilda Jr’ in our local library as part of their Bronze Arts Award. They also performed ‘Sister Act Jr’ alongside our technical theatre group in our local church for their Gold Arts Award.
We focus on the development of arts initiatives, sustaining exciting partnerships with organisations such as the Royal Ballet & Opera (RBO), Shakespeare North and local theatres, galleries and universities. These opportunities offer our Arts Award students the chance to see live events, work with industry professionals and gain performance experience. At every level of Arts Award there is the chance for a student to participate and gain new skills. This encourages the new contacts and greater collaboration within our local community.
Workshop experience
Our Bronze Arts Award programme is for students assisting the running of dance or music clubs and for our Creative Ambassadors; a team of students who advocate for the arts and mentor younger students. Silver Arts Award delivery is usually delivered for a technical crew cohort, dependent on staff availability. We run Gold Arts Award during Sixth Form enrichment time, every other Wednesday afternoon for two hours. Unit 1 is the focus during Year 12 and Unit 2 during Year 13.
We use all our contacts, alumni and local arts organisations to help us facilitate our Arts Award programme. We are fortunate that Little Theatre in Southport frequently audition for plays and musicals and two of our Gold cohort have recently acted in plays at the theatre performing in ‘DNA’ and an abridged version of Shakespeare’s ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’ which they used towards their Gold Arts Award Unit 1 Part A (Extend own arts practice) and Unit 1 Part B (Career development opportunities in the arts). These students can also volunteer to work backstage at the theatre’s productions to extend their skills.
In addition to this, we have wonderful contacts at The Atkinson in Southport; an art gallery, museum, library and theatre. They often provide our students with work experience for Gold Unit 1 Part B. For example, we have model makers assisting in Lego clubs and artists learning how to curate art in their gallery.
World Book Day 2025
We are passionate about the outreach performing arts work that we provide to local schools. Our creative arts community work is a contributing factor in gaining our Platinum Artsmark.
To celebrate World Book Day 2025, our Creative Arts Faculty created performances for our school musical theatre and choir clubs for Bronze Arts Award Part A: Explore the arts as a participant. This included dance, physical theatre and songs from ‘The Little Mermaid’. As we foster close relationships with our feeder primary schools, we decided to make the event a collaboration with Redgate Primary School.
In two lessons a week, our creative arts team then led theatre workshops with Year 4 and 5 children. This included an ‘Alice in Wonderland’ tea party dance, the song ‘Dig a Little Deeper’ from ‘The Princess and the Frog’ and a drama excerpt from ‘Annie’, representing well-loved characters from books and scripts.
Our secondary students then joined children from our feeder Redgate Primary School, to create a cabaret style showcase event. Following the event we organised a Bronze Part D (Arts skills share) opportunity. Our secondary students lead workshops by teaching songs and dances from their performance to pupils from Redgate. The primary school used this experience towards Arts Award Explore Part A (Take part) activities and for and Part D (Share).
The showcase combined the talents of different ages of children. It was a joyful collaborative celebration of many colourful characters which brought our young community together for World Book Day.
'A Midsummer Night's Dream' Choral Society Concert
We are constantly in search of opportunities to expand our community collaboration and to provide a platform and voice for Arts Award students. This year our annual summer concert became a community collaboration with the Formby Choral Society. The concert took place on a Midsummer’s Day evening and involved our Arts Award students who performed music, dance, drama, musical theatre and poetry. We joined the Choral Society to sing a number of ‘summery’ items.
The concept began with a whole raft of initiatives being proposed, discussed and selected. With our Gold Arts Award students in mind, we wanted to use this event to encourage our students to focus on Unit 1 Part A (Extend own arts practice) to make some original work for the concert. Our current Gold students are focussing on a diverse mix of art forms including music, art and dance.
Our Gold music students are also members of our choir and to expand their skills they participated in a song writing project led by our Music Technology teacher to create ‘The song of the Summer’. Once the song was complete it was circulated and our Voiceworks choir sang this jointly with the Choral Society. During the dress rehearsal it was wonderful when the separate parts of the song, coalesced and worked beautifully together. Here is a link to the song on Padlet with the original ideas of the songwriting session.
The concert collaboration prompted a competition for the artwork of the concert poster. The winning entry for the poster came from a Gold Arts Award art student. A Gold dance student choreographed a contemporary dance piece for the event, ‘Like a singing Bird’.
The event was a fantastic celebration of people engaging with the performing and creative arts and provided important opportunities for Gold students to experience creating new and authentic work.
Sustainability
We believe in developing the whole person and embedding transferable skills while connecting a community. We encourage all Arts Award students from the start to join additional clubs and societies to further develop their art form skills. We work towards sustainability by nurturing younger students growing through the school and encourage older students to pass on their knowledge. This ideology has enabled us to build an inclusive community, spark creativity and empower a diverse mix of student voices.
Header photo: A choral and Arts Award dance collaboration for the Midsummer Night's Dream concert, by Clare Garnett
Comments & Replies