London features

Regional news

Click here to view the latest national e-bulletin for advisers Apr 2010
Click here to view the latest regional e-special Jun 2010

If you are an adviser and did not receive this e-bulletin please contact us to confirm your correct email address.

Arts Award Success at St Marks Church of England Academy

St Marks is an Academy with joint Specialisms in Science and Performing Arts in its third year of running Arts Award, and students have already achieved almost 200 Bronze and Silver awards. Arts Award is run as a Summer Term cross-artform project in Music and Drama, giving all of Year 9 the opportunity to achieve a Bronze award. Running the award during lessons, advisers work to find creative ways to engage the students and ensure as many as possible are successful in achieving their Bronze award.

The Silver Arts Award is offered to students in Year 10 who have been successful at achieving the Bronze award. Students have opportunities to take leading roles in school Arts events as performers, organisers, student leaders or facilitators. They attend regular live performances, workshops and are expected to take part in as many opportunities as possible relating to their Art form. Students really lead their own Silver Award experience and use their own creativity to come up with the ideas for their arts challenge and supervised arts leadership. The advisor is very much a facilitator at this level.

St Marks also run the Silver Award as alternative to GCSE/BTEC in Years 10/11 Drama and Music with students who have not had the skills to achieve a GCSE in their art form, but are able to find success through the Arts Award Silver. These students work in small groups during their lessons with an attached Teaching Assistant, who is a trained advisor. All the students on this programme have been successful at achieving their Silver Award which is fantastic for both them and the school.

Olivia Douse, Deputy Head : Specialism says 'The Arts Award is a fantastic qualification. It is unique in that it recognises the process as well as the product. It is not about fact-learning and cramming information – Arts Award literally celebrates students’ personal, social, moral and cultural growth through the Arts.'

One student summed up the experience: 'The Arts Award has been brilliant! It really helped me build my confidence, I seriously would never have believed I could be a teacher and give my skills to others. I didn’t think they would listen to me but they loved it and I loved it and it was great!'

Spotlight on Gold Arts Award choreographer

Josh Chester, who achieved his Gold Arts Award last year, is profiled on londondance.com. Josh talks about how the project stretched him as a choreographer and what his future plans are, along with photos of some of his work. Read more...

Success in Southall

Five groups of young people from a diverse range of backgrounds achieved their Arts Award working with Southall Alliance. They received their certificates from the Mayor at an event where some of those involved spoke about their Arts Award experience. To read more and see pictures click here

Artsdepot Arts Award Projects

The Worshipful Mayor of the London Borough of Barnet presented the certificates to young people who took part in projects run by ArtsDepot. The projects were:

Circus Theatre: a summer project on the Four Hills estate in Enfield run in collaboration with Enfield Homes which led to a performance in the Studio Theatre

Re:verb: a verbatim theatre project with young offenders run in partnership with Barnet Youth Offending Team which led to a performance in the Studio Theatre

Roots and Wings: a project for young refugees, asylum seekers and young people recently arrived in the UK, run in partnership with Barnet Refugee Service who explored dance from around the world and did a performance to 70 people

Alter Egos: a residency project with Haringey Pupil Support Centre using visual arts and music, where each young person created their own fully produced CD with artwork.

Canada Villa Mosaic: a project at the Canada Villa Youth Centre over the October half term 2009 run in partnership with Barnet Youth and Connexions. Young people created and installed a mosaic in the youth centre.

Visual Roots: two young people undertook three month placements in our gallery as part of an engage initiative to support young people’s pathways into visual arts. One young person focussed on photography and one on glass work.

38 young people achieved Arts Award, two of these were Silver and the rest were Bronze. Four of these young people have already started working on their Silver award and their adviser, Cate Gordon says “ We love the Arts Award as it is so beneficial to the young people and it really does challenge them at the same time as giving them space to explore the arts.”

Arts Award and Higher Education

A pilot project run by Arts Award London and the Widening Participation team at University of the Arts London has led to a group of twelve young people between 17 and 25 gaining Gold Arts Awards. The project linked Community Arts organisations with Higher Education Institutions and supported young people to develop new work in dance, theatre, fashion and spoken word for Shoreditch Festival 09, plus create a TV show about the work. Read more here