Bronze Arts Award: Trips and Cultural Visits - adding value to the experience

This resource gives tips for organisations leading young people through the Bronze Arts Award, but it will be useful to anyone arranging arts trips and cultural visits for groups of children and young people. Trips and cultural visits are vital to the Arts Award programme and provide an opportunity for the young people involved to be challenged by new experiences. As well as simply observing an art form, it is really important you look at ways of actively encouraging the young people to participate and engage with the work itself and those producing it.

• Contact the host venue and ask if the group could have a pre-concert talk or post – concert de-brief with venue staff or even artists performing.
• Think about how you can work collaboratively with resident artists in host venues and ensure they have a clear understanding of what you and the young people are trying to achieve through the visit
• Ask artists to think about their own skills/experience/knowledge and how they can convey this to the young people

Case study

We have involved a Q and A session in the past. As we have a bank of music professionals (local MC's, lyricists, musicians and DJ's) as part of our team we have facilitated a mini careers talk, where the music professionals have given a brief talk about their route into and experience of the music industry and the group have been able to have a Q and A session afterwards. This has been one the most positive aspects of our music programme. (Leanne Sutton, Director of Development & Education, Send Project, Nottingham)