How could we improve our Arts Award engagment?

Here are some reflections on our varied experiences of the impact of Arts Award in different settings - particularly with regards to engaging young professionals

In many cases, Arts Award is a great and accessible way to allow young people to find creative routes towards achieving a qualification.

We have guided many young people through this process and it is very rewarding to see someone receive their qualification, especially in the cases where they may have felt disenfranchised by other educational systems.

We often work with Young People at risk of exclusion. In many cases,  they have had bad experiences of mainstream education for all sorts of reasons that I won't go into  here - but regardless, lots of these Young People have found Arts Award a very rewarding achievement. Which is great.

However, after a few years we have started to notice some patterns in settings where the accreditation process has not worked so well. We have even had examples where we've questioned whether using Arts Award, in certain context, has been a hindrance   e.g.    Bridges a Youth Music funded project at Brighton & Hove Youth Offending Service where we've trained some amazing young music leaders, who in some cases have gone on to run projects for AudioActive and other arts organisations. However, a crucial part of this process is that we have required these trainees need to undertake a Silver Arts Award in order to demonstrate their ability to work independently and to respond to criteria or requirements - a skill that they will need after they complete their training and become paid Asst Music Leaders on the project (or beyond).

In this situation, we have had much less success. Trainees may have intially been happy to do their Silver Arts Award, which aligned nicely with the in-house training they were attending with us. But in some cases, we have been frustrated that a couple of excellent young music leaders have totally disengaged with AudioActive when, after the end of the course, the pressure is on to complete and submit their folders. Despite having worked with us for months of training and music leading in parallel they now have no qualification to show for their hard work, and we have lost some of our most promising new music leaders. Often, they might have already completed most of their Arts Award.  

We're not really sure what has 'gone wrong'. There are lots of possible explanations, but in this context it seems to be something about the Arts Award that has not worked. We're interested to hear from anyone else out there who has had similar experiences and especially keen to hear if anyone has found a good solution or approach that means that YP's achievement needn't be compromised in order to best retain them and support them to reach their potential.