All Star Entertainment Design4Life Project - Delivering Arts Awards

Michael Davis - All Star Entertainment Project Manager, music tutor and Arts Award Advisor talks about his experience of delivering Arts Awards successfully to young people in Bradford as part of their Youth Music funded Design4Life Project  

In October 2015 as part of our Design4Life project we started a 6 month Arts Award Bronze music technology programme at two upper schools in the Bradford area with year 39 pupils aged 13-14yrs.

The Arts Award Bronze is an easily accessible and inclusive arts award qualification through which young people can explore their own creativity, learn about performance, find out more about the artists they are inspired by and develop their own teaching skills and styles.

Both of our programmes were a pleasure to deliver - to see young people actively engaging, appreciating art and communicating successfully with each other throughout the programme was both a pleasant and rewarding experience.

In a world where social media, self-promotion, TV music and art competitions rule - the Arts Award is a breath of fresh air putting life, soul and genuine creativity back into the arts and lifting the bar across the arts sector.

At times, the process of gathering evidence could have made the delivery of the programme easier - with staff feeling that the evidence and data collection outweighed the delivery 60/40…

However, with the help of the Arts Award helpline, task sheets and our own online portal - we went on to successfully collect and process evidence for each learner with ease.

The programmes finished in May and saw an outstanding 39 pupils achieve the Arts Award Bronze award! Sidrha - a student on one of the courses said ‘I learnt how to use the equipment properly (Machine, Traktor). I’ve given the course 10/10 because I didn’t get bored and I get bored easily!’

Those pupils deemed hard to reach pupils and those who English as a second language skills also managed to successfully pass this award with sincere enjoyment and ease.

‘James’ for example was looking forward to our programme and wanted to learn more about music technology, so our programme was perfect. He excelled at using the Ableton Maschine and the Pioneer RMX 1000 – showing a keen interest, enthusiasm and determination to succeed. Although James struggled at times whilst filling out his task sheets, he didn’t give up and completed all four parts of the Arts Award Bronze’.

‘James’ said ’The recording went well because I was confident’.