Nine top tips for delivering Arts Award as part of your festival

The festival season is nearly here! Did you know that Arts Award has been successfully embedded and delivered at a number of festivals across the UK including; Juice Festival in the north east, Latitude Festival in the east, The Bath Festival in the south west, Readipop Festival in the south east and MozFest in London.

From large scale festivals such as Glastonbury to small local village book festivals, Arts Award can be a part of any music, dance, film, literary and theatre festival. Whether your event takes place on one day or over a month, this blog is designed to support organisations that wish to deliver Arts Award at their festivals by providing helpful tips and guidance. With this in mind, below are our nine top tips for embedding Arts Award into your festival.

Trained Arts Award advisers. Ensure that you have Arts Award advisers on your staff or volunteer team that are trained to the level of Arts Award that you wish to offer. Advisers may be delivering sessions themselves as well as supporting young people to document their Arts Award journeys. Therefore, depending on the size of your festival and the number of young people that you expect to take part, you may need to have more than one trained Arts Award adviser. It will help if these Arts Award advisers are easily identifiable - perhaps a badge, t-shirt or festival chic hat!

Decide on the appropriate level. As an introductory award, Discover is a great option for encouraging families to engage with the arts along with cultural experiences that your festival offers. Meanwhile, Silver Arts Award has also been successfully used to accredit some of the fantastic leadership projects that young people have undertaken at BE Festival. These projects will involve activity outside of the festival itself. For instance, the run-up to a festival will offer opportunities such as marketing and promotion, bookings, event management and curation.

Chris Baldwin, co-founder and director of Sonic Boom Music CIC who deliver Bronze Arts Award at festivals says:

'Festivals are vibrant, immersive spaces where creativity comes alive. From music and performance to visual arts and behind-the-scenes production, festivals offer young people an authentic, hands-on way to engage with the arts.'

Map to existing activity. Look at what your festival has on offer and consider how specific Arts Award levels can map to this existing activity. Check out our mapping documents to help you plot your festival activity against the relevant framework.

Provide appropriate resources for young people to complete their award. Check out our free Discover Arts Award A3 map which can be adapted to suit your festival. Feel free to design your own map, logbook or booklet and contact us to ensure that it provides appropriate opportunities to collate the evidence required and meets the assessment criteria. More resources can be found on our Adviser hub.

Think about how you are going to charge visitors for the cost of completing their Arts Award. You may wish to include the cost in the ticket price, for example.

Signpost visitors to Arts Award activities. You can use our Arts Award Centre logo for visitors to identify which activities and events could contribute to their Arts Award. This could be a concert, performance, film screening or exhibition. You may also wish to schedule specific activities such as arts workshops, which focus on supporting young people to achieve their Arts Award.

Consider having an information point for visitors to come to with any questions as they are completing their Arts Award.

Finally, make sure to collect necessary contact details. For young people that are completing their Discover Arts Award during the course of your festival you will need to ensure that you collect the necessary details from visitors, so that certificates can be ordered from Trinity College London.

Chris says:

'If you’re considering running Arts Award at your festival, go for it! Give young people the opportunity to step into the creative world, and you’ll see their confidence, skills, and passion flourish.'

If you have further questions relating to your Arts Award delivery please email artswardenquiries@trinitycollege.co.uk or call 0207 820 6178.