How Arts Award can help you meet your enrichment benchmarks

The Department for Education’s ‘enrichment benchmarks’, were introduced earlier this year to create a ‘structure against which schools and colleges can effectively evaluate their own provision and make appropriate and considered improvements to their offer.’ In this blog we will explore how Arts Award can support with achieving these benchmarks.

The new Enrichment Framework for Schools and Colleges sets out eight benchmarks and explicitly includes arts and culture as one of the five minimum categories of enrichment. The framework requires schools not just to offer activities, but to demonstrate things such as participation, accessibility, pupil voice, partnerships, outcomes and continuous improvement.

Arts Award provides a flexible, recognised framework through which schools and colleges can plan, accredit and evidence their arts and cultural enrichment. 

1.    A strategically aligned enrichment offer

‘A school or college has an enrichment offer underpinned by its strategic vision and aligned with its broader priorities’

Arts Award can support schools or colleges to create a structured enrichment offer that can be easily understood by staff, senior leaders and governors and can be built into the school's existing enrichment, personal development, curriculum or careers strategy. Arts Award advisers must attend adviser training, demonstrating buy in from senior leadership. The outcomes and delivery of Arts Award require a clear plan for implementation, while the moderation process, when selected, offers opportunities for monitoring and development.

Offering different levels of Arts Award can create progression, which can help schools demonstrate that their enrichment offer isn't simply a collection of clubs, but provides progression opportunities rooted in cultural participation and creative development. This is especially useful for Benchmark 1, because schools can map Arts Award progression against their wider personal development or curriculum strategy.

2.    A broad and well-rounded enrichment offer

‘Pupils and students have multiple and varied opportunities to engage in enrichment activities that are purposeful, fun and can support a thriving childhood and successful transition to adulthood.’ 

Delivery of Arts Award can support evidencing of a broad and well-rounded enrichment offer, with Arts Award directly strengthening the arts and culture strand of the framework. The arts and cultural strand requires every student to have access to activities including music, art, dance, theatre, expressive arts and live experience of/visits to museums/galleries etc. All of which are integral to the Arts Award framework.

3.    A well-communicated enrichment offer that celebrates participation and achievement

‘A school or college has an enrichment offer that is understood by pupils, students and parents, and celebrates participation and achievement.’

Benchmark 3 specifically highlights certification, awards, reports and recognition of participation and achievement. Arts Award provides a tangible achievement that schools can celebrate through certificates, exhibitions, performances, assemblies, showcases and reports. The portfolio itself captures the learner's participation and achievement.     

Arts Award gives schools a particularly straightforward way of doing this because:
•    Discover provides a recognised introductory award; 
•    Explore, Bronze, Silver and Gold provide progressive qualifications; 
•    Explore–Gold sit within the regulated qualification framework; 
•    Gold carries 16 UCAS points. 

So schools can demonstrate both breadth of participation and depth of achievement.

4.    An enrichment offer shaped by the school or college community

'The enrichment offer is shaped with involvement from the whole school or college community, with consideration of its contexts and a particular focus on pupil and student voice and choice.’ 

Delivering Arts Award allows you to draw on the interests, expertise and capacity of school or college staff as well as, where appropriate, parents or guardians in the wider network. Arts Award can allow for student leadership of enrichment activities, for example Silver or Gold students running workshops for Bronze students.

Arts Award's flexibility allows young people to follow their own artistic interests. At higher levels, learners have increasing responsibility for planning activities, researching artists and developing their own practice. The Silver and Gold Unit 2 Arts Leadership project require a high level of independence.     

5.    An accessible and engaging enrichment offer

‘The enrichment offer is designed to be accessible and engaging for all pupils and students.’ 

Arts Award is a flexible and inclusive qualification that can be adapted across ages, abilities and art forms. Students evidence their work using a range of formats appropriate to their learning styles or individual requirements, including audio or video recording, annotated photos, signs and symbols (eg Makaton, Signalong, BSL), and scribed responses.    

There is no end-date by which students must have completed their work, allowing students to work at a pace that suits them and their needs.

6.    An enrichment offer that works in partnership

‘Pupils and students have opportunities to experience enrichment activities supported or delivered by high-quality external partners, in addition to opportunities developed within the school or college.’

Benchmark 6 explicitly identifies arts organisations, theatres, museums, libraries, artists-in-residence and other cultural partners as potential enrichment partners.  Arts Award can accredit activity delivered with artists, theatres, galleries, museums, cultural organisations, creative employers and arts practitioners. This gives schools a mechanism for turning partnerships into sustained, evidenced learning rather than one-off experiences. Instead of the theatre visit being recorded simply as ‘Year 9 visited the theatre’, the school has evidence of what learners actually gained from the experience.

7.    An outcomes-focused enrichment offer
‘A school or college identifies the pupil and student outcomes its enrichment offer aims to achieve, and tracks these over time.’

Arts Award requires learners to evidence what they have experienced, learned, created, researched etc. The portfolio provides individual evidence of progress rather than simply recording attendance.     

A school might currently be able to say:
‘We offer a drama club.’
Arts Award enables it to say:
‘Students participated in drama, researched practitioners, developed their own creative work, reflected on their learning and produced assessed evidence of their progress.’

That distinction is important for Benchmark 7 as the DfE specifically asks schools to identify intended outcomes and collect data to monitor them. Arts Award portfolios are particularly useful here because they can contain written, photographic, video, audio and other evidence, rather than requiring everything to be demonstrated through a conventional written assessment. 

8.    A continually improving enrichment offer

‘A school or college puts in place consistent and efficient mechanisms to improve the quality and impact of any enrichment activity or the enrichment offer as a whole.’

Arts Award gives schools a structure through which to gather learner evidence and reflection. This can be combined with participation data, student voice, adviser evaluation, centre monitoring or moderation feedback to review the quality and impact of the arts offer.    

We hope you have found this blog useful, you can find more resources exploring how Arts Award can support schools , including our school resource pack, Discover and your Arts Week, and how to run Arts Award as an after school or lunchtime club, on our resource library.