Our Arts Award Good Practice Centre programme has been successfully highlighting the work of Arts Award centres for seven years. Now, based on feedback from our previous Good Practice Centres, we’re excited to announce some key changes to the programme; these include expanding the programme to include Music and Drama centres and relaunching the initiative as Trinity Champion Centres. As we start taking applications for Trinity Champion Centres 2019-2020, we take some time to hear from two of our previous Good Practice Centres on how they found the role.
Prior to applying to become a Good Practice Centre, we developed a coherent and considered plan for engaging young people as audiences and leaders in the arts through the Oska Bright Film Festival. It was an ambitious project that aimed to deliver 70 Discover and 8 Bronze Arts Awards. From the group of learning disabled artists who undertook Bronze Arts Award, we supported four people to become trained as Arts Award Advisers for Discover and Explore. These artists then went on to support the delivery of our Arts Award Discover project at the centre.
Arts Award is now fully embedded in the delivery of our Young Oska Bright project. We have renewed relationships with local schools and the qualification has helped us connect with the Cultural Educational Offer in our area. We recruited a new team of four young learning disabled artists to lead on this work, and we are approaching the next edition of the Oska Bright Film Festival with similar targets for Arts Award Discover. The project involved lots of peer to peer learning and support, demonstrating how the different levels of Arts Award can work together. Most recently, one of our artists, Tina Dickinson, became the first person supported by us to achieve a Gold Arts Award!
We’ve developed a new dedicated freelance role which coordinates this area of work and are helping other organisations in Brighton & Hove to develop accessible resources and plans for delivering Arts Award in their setting. We’re looking forward to sharing our expertise in this area and supporting local SEND schools to get involved in Arts Award and see the benefits for themselves.
When I saw the information about Good Practice Centres it ticked lots of boxes for me. As our centre’s main Arts Award adviser I saw it as a great opportunity to celebrate and share all the hard work we’ve put in over the past 10 years, working with young people to support their journey towards attaining an Arts Award, as part of their time with Heads Together Productions and now Chapel FM Arts Centre.
I trained to deliver Arts Award over 12 years ago and it is now an integral part of young people’s work. It’s not just about achieving the award, it’s about instilling learnings, finding creative ways to reflect, share and discuss, and being an arts centre with a radio studio makes this very accessible. I was slightly daunted by the idea of filling in an application form to apply but once it was underway I realised how many stories I had. So many positive examples and outcomes from having done Arts Award for so long that I really enjoyed the process - I felt proud. I felt even more proud when our application was successful.
Being a Good Practice Centre allowed me to shout about what we do, we started using the logo within emails and sharing with funders and core partners. During the year we held a celebration and networking event for that year’s Arts Award achievers. In the networking event, I made our focus about Gold Arts Award, this was an area where we had a few participants working towards this award but they were the first cohort and so we were all a little nervous and required advice and support. Our network meeting enabled myself and the young people to ask questions and gain guidance in the areas they needed.
Having a key link to Trinity and Arts Award through Layne Harrod, our Sector Support Manager, was incredibly helpful. Layne assisted me with many a query and was able to attend our Arts Award celebration event and hand out certificates to young people.
As an organisation we made a commitment to working with the young people of East Leeds, who are the change makers of the future. It was great for us to have Arts Award as an accreditation that young people of all abilities can achieve and talk about, whether that be with friends and parents, or interviews to college and HE, it’s an important part of what we do.
We are now open for applications from registered Arts Award centres to become a Trinity Champion Centre. We are accepting applications until 31st March 2019 and chosen centres will be notified by early April. Please read the brief in full before making an application here