After school or intensive projects? Which worked better for us, and why...

After a few tries we realised that our after school clubs were just not matching up to our holiday intensives. Below we discuss why:

 

Kinetika Bloco and my past team, the Croydon Youth Arts team, had worked together on a pilot project funded by Sound Connections. The project was well attended and successful. This pilot included both an open access intensive and an after school project specifically for young people with SEN. So when we put together our bid to Youth Music to continue Croydon Bloco we decided to continue with a mixture of holiday intensives and after school provision (both open access this time).

However, we quickly realised this was not working and we needed to redesign the project. The holiday provision was buzzing and popular with smiles all round, yet the after school project was dwindling in numbers and energy each week.

Youth Music kindly let us redesign our bid and we cancelled the after school group to add 2 more intensives. This worked really well. But why?

Having spoken to young people, parents and carers and staff, these are the reasons:

 

Longer days

In the holidays you can meet a group for longer days (we normally meet for at least 5 hours). This means there is space and time to play games too (which builds the group cohesion and friendships), rather than just having 90 minutes to settle a group, get them focussed, learn something, and send them on their way.

It also means that the group can have some relaxing time together, to get to know each other in different ways, such as sitting and eating lunch together.

Not only that, there is a real sense of achievement at the end of each day when normally we have learnt an entire song and can put all the sections together!

 

Easier to learn the music

In an intensive we found that they young people get a lot more invested in the activity because they are coming every day, they can see the progress in their music making much more easily. When we were meeting them weekly most of the session would be spent recapping what was learnt the previous week, rather than learning anything new. Of course this feels boring, especially to those new to music making. Also, many of the young people we wor with struggled with their concentration levels, so constantly recapping didn’t help.

We also leant, not only does an intensive feel more fun to the participants, but it’s also better for the audience too, as the artistic product was consistently a much higher standard after the intensives.

 

Young people feel fresh

Our intensives happen during school holidays so young people come fresh each day. We also start later than a school day (normally either 10 or 11am) so young people still get a lie in and that holiday feeling.

When they came to the after school club, they were often knackered from the school day and didn’t want to ‘learn’ any more. Many of them had difficult relationships with education so school was very exhausting for them. Arriving in school uniform often meant that young people felt less relaxed and hadn’t let go of their school persona.

In an intensive, young people can come in the holidays and create fresh identities and new approaches to what learning can be.

 

It’s easier to commit

Many of the young people we work with are from challenging circumstances so they and their families are often not used to weekly commitments (for a number of reasons such as not able to afford after school provision in the past, chaotic homelives etc).

We consistently had difficulties with young people arriving very late to sessions and parents picking their young people up late, which put a strain on planning sessions and on staffs’ time. As the nights drew in in the autumn some parents withdrew their young people as they were worried about them travelling home in the dark.

However, during intensives most of the young people can travel by themselves or with friends, so timekeeping is less of an issue, and we finish by 4pm, so it’s normally still light.

 

Space management is easier

We have many huge drums, so meeting weekly is a demand on space management. Our host venue at this time, Fairfield Halls gave us storage space which was great, but still meant staff needed to arrive early to move the instruments from one floor to another and then back again after debrief. However in an intensive most spaces have let us leave out the instruments ready for the next day and just lock the door. Bonus!

 

Family feel

In a holiday intensive young people build camaraderie much quicker with the rest of the group, because of the intensity of being together for several days. So much of what we do with the young people is about building a family feel that they feel safe in, that they are a part of, that they can open up in and then explore their creativity and make music together. Intensive experiences in the right environment speed up that process of social interaction. For some of the young people we work with re-creating that environment and experience each week for 90 mins is very difficult for both them and staff.

 

 

Having said all of this there is still times when after school provision works really well. For instance: Both Kinetika Bloco and my team have found that weekly sessions work better with SEN groups too, we are not 100% sure why this is but there seems to be patterns of this being more successful (such as in our pilot).

Also, if a project is happening in a school building, we have found that young people find it easier to literally come straight after school to a space within their school. Parents/carers find this much easier too as they don’t have to worry about picking them up and dropping them off somewhere new, often during working hours.

 

All in all great learning that helped us redesign our next project together, which we have just started and is also kindly funded by Youth Music.

 

 

See more about us here: https://m.youtube.com/watch?v=fynOdPE0tS4&feature=youtu.be