Top Tips for Young Producer and School Arts Council Projects

18 January 2023

Arts Award is a brilliant framework to support the development of youth voice. Young people are asked to communicate their opinions, share their work and learnings, advocate for arts issues they are passionate about and curate and lead events. All of this helps our young people develop the confidence in their ideas and voices, increase their communication skills and develop their leadership skills. Young Producer programmes and School Arts Councils are great opportunities for cultural organisations and schools to enable this work and in this blogpost we explore some top tips for running these effectively.

Young Producer Programmes

Francesca Gkotsi is a Creative Learning Producer and Arts Award Adviser. She shared her experience of running young producer programmes.

I have worked on a number of young producers-type projects which were fantastic but one of my favorites, because of its multi-layered nature, was a project at Sarah Bonnell Secondary School in Newham. For this project I led a young leadership and young voice programme with Arts Award embedded throughout. The project was run by a team of creative organisations and creative school departments, for example the Music and Art departments were supported by Sound Connections, Wired4Music and the Creative Schools Programme. Over a period of three months young people programmed their school’s Summer Showcase, which in the past had been organised by staff, and ran a transition day for the new cohort of Year 7s. In addition to programming, students organised invitations, marketing materials, budget, social media channels and designed posters and flyers for the event. They were also responsible for the logistics and technical requirements for the showcase and transition event.

The young producers were in Years 10 and 11 and worked towards accreditation through Silver Arts Award. In addition, 240 primary school students in Year 6 who were joining the school in the Autum term, achieved a Discover Arts Award through the transition day, taking part in visual art, music and drama activities. Existing Year 7 and Year 8 pupils participated in attaining Bronze Arts Award, by planning the transition day with subject teachers and co-leading the sessions for incoming students. Bronze students also performed for the school showcase and helped with the organising. Throughout the process, Bronze leaders were mentored by the Silver Young Producers who were overseeing the wider programming.

Photo Credit: Soho Parish School

Francesca’s 3 top tips for a successful Young Producers Programme:

1. Young producers programmes are a great way to build foundation skillsets for young people. It is a platform for leadership, voice and lots of transferable skills. Layering peer mentoring and peer learning is an extremely effective strategy.
2. The Art Award offers a fantastic framework to scaffold this set of skills and if used at the earliest possible point of design, it becomes integral and works authentically and organically. There is a delicate balance between giving young people the freedom to authentically make decisions and take the lead and offering support and guidance. The biggest challenge for the staff involved is navigating this delicate balance. Staff briefings, training, and discussions of the process can make or break this type of project. Where possible co-design the programme with young people that have gone through the process before. “At some point everyone was kind of feeling like giving up, but with the kind of atmosphere and the feeling that we had in our team it was really helpful to keep us going, and that’s why we had such a successful showcase.” – Secondary Student

To find out more about Francesca’s work, or get in touch to set up an Arts Award project in your setting go to: www.linkedin.com/in/francescagkotsi/

School Arts Council

Hannah Peaty is a School Leader and Art Lead at Soho Parish Primary School, she told us about the schools Arts Council.

As an Artsmark Platinum school we highly value opportunities for children to engage in creative projects that will inspire and motivate them as well as serve the community. We value children’s input and voices so developed a KS2 student arts council 3 years ago.

One of the biggest responsibilities that the student Arts Council hold is to help plan our annual art week. Last year we used the National Gallery’s collections as our starting point.

The council worked closely with Caroline Smith the Education Learning Manager, who designed a bespoke workshop for us around the paintings that the council were interested in. She wanted to design a workshop for us around paintings that we were interested in. The paintings became our inspiration for projects during our annual art week later in the year and the children presented their ideas back at school to all of the teachers during a staff meeting.

After we worked with the National Gallery on planning ideas for our annual Art week, the National Gallery were so impressed with the group, that they invited us to work as creative consultants on redeveloping their Learning Centre.

Over the 3-day project, the children heard from architects about their ideas for the new space and then the children took part in workshops to develop their ideas and share how a space would help them to make and learn. They thought about design elements such as furniture, interactive elements, colours, light and sound. They created models to share their ideas and then presented these to the architects and other members of the Learning Team. We were so impressed at the ideas they gave and how articulately they expressed and presented them, as well as the amazing models they created! It’s so important that children’s ideas and voices are heard, so this was a great opportunity to work on such a big project.

Photo Credit: Soho Parish School

Hannah’s 3 top tips for a successful Arts Council:

1. Inspire: Provide opportunities for them to take part in like being a focus group for a project, visiting a museum or gallery, that will inspire them to want to come up with ideas that can benefit the whole school community.
2. Engage: Engage the children’s imagination, support them to engage effectively with each other as a group and share ideas.
3. Action: Support them to put their ideas into action to build their confidence and benefit the growth of the Arts

To speak to Hannah about how to set up an Arts Council in your school and make connections with local arts organisations please contact: hannah@sohoparish.co.uk

As Hannah mentioned, action is key with these programmes. Read Christopher Gorry’s provocation- Now is the time for Action. Not advice.