For those of you in education, youth and community organisations, your current focus might be on ‘recovery' activities in the wake of the pandemic and looking ahead to next year’s curriculum plans. Or you might be considering how to make the most of the coming term and summer break to reconnect young people with their communities, artists, cultural organisations and social groups. In either case, Arts Award provides an ideal framework for planning, delivering and evaluating your creative activities.
The Department for Education’s Catch-Up Premium and Summer School Provision encourage schools to offer specific activities to support pupils to re-engage with learning, recommending they take a sustainable approach in line with catch-up priorities. This helpful overview from the Cultural Learning Alliance for the Summer School Provision demonstrates how the funding can be used for arts activities.
For those outside of school, the government’s Holiday Activities and Food programme has been extended this year to provide more young people aged five to 16, who are eligible for free school meals with free holiday club provision.
Allowing some budget for Arts Award activities, certificates and moderation can be a legitimate cost as part of any of these government funds.
Arts Award offers a series of levels that can be mapped to targeted intervention programmes, enrichment and holiday activity. The four qualifications and one introductory award support participants to progress while gaining transferable skills such as problem solving, communication and leadership. You’ll find some ideas below for embedding Arts Award into your summer plans.
We are also running a webinar to explore these themes in more detail on the 29th April - we hope to see you there.
Summer School programmes as part of the Department for Education recovery package are likely to focus on transition into year 7 through a 1 or 2 week project. Schools need to opt in to this by the end of April 2021 in order to claim funding. Schools are encouraged to work with other organisations including the arts and cultural sector to consider a broad activity offer.
As the Summer Schools guidance states:
most will want to focus this provision primarily on pupils making the transition into year 7.
For young people preparing to move into Key Stage 3 in September, Bronze Arts Award is a Level 1 qualification and a perfect framework for any summer school programme.
The transition from primary to secondary is often a key focus for schools in the summer term - even in more usual times - and as such there’s a host of resources, activities and analysis to help students have a successful start to their secondary education. One approach to transition is coming up with a project that bridges the gap – something that young people will begin in their primary school but go on to complete in secondary. Arts Award’s flexible nature means it offers a great framework for delivering a project of this kind. For instance, young people completing Bronze might review an arts event for Part B and share it with their peers at secondary to build confidence. Or Part D’s arts skill share could be used as an opportunity for the new secondary students to get to know each other.
As our Impact Study demonstrated;
Arts Award [gives] young people from a range of backgrounds confidence in their abilities.
This is a key skill to gain when it comes to addressing concerns about the anxiety that many students report about moving to secondary school.
While Bronze can be embedded into a year-long curriclum plan, it is very achievable to deliver over the course of a week or two. Delivering intensively enables young people to focus on their skills development, and can have an incredibly rapid positive impact, especially around confidence, resilience and communication skills.
Our resource shows you how to deliver Bronze in a week, and our guest blog from Nonsuch Theatre explores their Bronze in a Week programme with Thamesmead School.
If you are working with a range of abilities or a very mixed cohort, Discover and Explore are two other levels that work well to a condensed delivery timeframe. Our Five Sessions to Explore resource shows you how to deliver this level over a week, and our Discover in a Day resource for music shows you how to offer this as part of a longer transition programme.
Last year in response to the Coronavirus pandemic Trinity College London launched Discover at Home, a special version of Arts Award Discover. Since then, many organisations have created their own bespoke Discover at Home packages, ensuring that young people can continue to achieve their Discover Arts Award regardless of barriers or challenges schools, young people and arts organisations may be facing.
If young people want to receive their Arts Award Discover certificate they will need to work in partnership with an Arts Award adviser and centre, however the Discover at Home resource can be used as a stand-alone ideas pack for families looking for creative activities to complete together at home.
Providing access to the Discover at Home pack is a great way for schools to support parents and carers who want to help their children to re-engage with learning and creative activity over the summer, while working towards the certificate gives a sense of achievement and a confidence boosting opportunity for children.
Enrichment opportunities allow children and young people to explore the arts in a different environment to the curriculum. This can be a great way to engage students who may think that the arts are not for them. They may find a talent and a love for art which otherwise may not come out of a classroom approach. Having structured, additional time to focus on a subject will lead to skills development which can be transferred back to the classroom.
How about…
Our resources on how to run Arts Award as a lunchtime or extra-curricular activity may be useful if you are thinking about delivering in this way.
We have further inspiration and guidance on our Bronze Arts Award extra-curricular resource page.
Structured projects delivered one to one or in small groups to support pupils with specific development areas. For example, in a particular curriculum area such as literacy, or supporting social and emotional needs such as self-confidence or metacognition.
How about:
Our Arts Award Explore and KS2 Literacy resource explores how you can link this level to your curriculum planning.
We also have a wonderful guest blog from a centre who used Arts Award in 2020 to support an intervention group - delivered socially distanced without online tools.
All levels of Arts Award can be delivered remotely or in a blended way. Whilst we hope that summer term and holiday and activities will take place in person, with Arts Award you can be sure that if plans need to change, delivery can continue through a mixture of remote engagement and collection of digital evidence.
Over recent months we’ve seen a growing collection of Bronze resources created by Arts Award centres that are enabling young people to take part in the award independently or remotely. These are a great source of inspiration for centres planning to offer Bronze Arts Award this summer and encouraging some independent remote learning.
If you haven’t already seen Arts Award’s brand new interactive Bronze log for music, it is fully digital and editable and can be downloaded here.
Find out more about a blended approach to Bronze Arts Award with our recent webinar and support page.
We also have a collection of 'lunchtime chats', filmed over last summer exploring how different Arts Award centres and partners adapted their delivery.
We recognise that many young people will prefer not to be engaged in writing or other styles of evidencing that feel too academic for an extra-curricular or holiday club environment. The Arts Award framework offers plenty of flexibility so that participants can create evidence in any format they wish. This includes photos, film, voice recordings, drawing, creative responses and digital evidence.
Supporting Mental health and wellbeing during the Covid recovery period
Mental health is increasingly recognised as a key factor in children and young people’s overall wellbeing that has suffered due to lockdown and the ongoing stresses of the national pandemic. At Arts Award, we are strong advocates for the impact arts and creativity have on wellbeing.
Recognising that participation in Arts Award can boost essential character traits such as self confidence and resilience, your setting can ensure that art is does not become a temporary palliative measure during these challenging times, but instead a core part of the co-curriculum embedded into many subject areas. Our off-the-shelf KS3 resources for Music, Art and Design and English and Drama will provide ideas and inspiration to help boost arts curriculum delivery, and provide an accreditation before GCSE study whilst supporting the wellbeing of students.
Both Arts Award and PSHE support the development of skills such as self-esteem, teamwork, and critical thinking, and there are many ways in which you could link what you are already doing in class at Key Stage 1, 2 and 3 to your Arts Award delivery. This will not only enrich your students learning experience, but reduce some of your workload and make the most of your planning time. Find out more here.
