Making time for accreditation

This blog is part of a resource called Overcoming the Challenges of Delivering Music-Making Projects (part two). Part two explores workforce development, accreditation and sustainability . The information comes from evaluation reports provided from projects funded by Youth Music for the charity's 2011-2012 Impact Report.

One organisation found that it was a challenge to keep young people motivated to achieve their Arts Awards and a strain on staff time. They found that making a documentary of their musical journey gathered the Arts Award evidence they needed, kept the young people engaged and fitted well with their existing evaluation plans:

"We didn’t realise how hard getting people through the Arts Award would be. Both in terms of the work it involved and keeping the young people motivated to achieve it. We got off to a flying start, some parts of the process were really easy and the young people were happy to do certain bits of it.

"The biggest problem was collating all the evidence needed towards the end of the Arts Award. Making time in busy sessions isn’t always easy especially if not everyone is doing the awards, the young people didn’t always want to stop what they were doing to do something less exciting. Also the cost of having an additional member of staff to just do the award work wasn’t always possible and when the sessions are packed anyway the staff haven’t always got the time to support this. In the end we found that making a documentary of the young people’s musical journey was the best way, it could be tied into the evaluation evidence we were gathering and we could use footage of other things which we would normally record anyway such as performance and footage to go with tracks they were making."