FEATURE FOCUS: ALTERNATIVE PROVISION


Aaron is one of our students who was with us for three years. He is combining a mainstream college course in art with running a business. He has developed good digital skills and helps people with their websites and Instagram. One of the senior team members is meeting him this week to see if he will come back and offer some peer to peer mentoring to our current students on being a self-employed creative.


to day, week to week?


I spotted that there was an empty Art Room at The Silk Museum in Macclesfield. I asked if I could lease it and then I started contacting schools explaining what I was doing. I began to get referrals and started building processes, policies, procedures from the ground up. It was hard because there wasn’t a senior leadership team or a huge cash injection from a philanthropist. It was just me.


How did you develop the curriculum? The Silk Museum, and the wider Macclesfield Museum, had a lot of collateral, not just artefacts but expertise, local knowledge, events, special exhibitions, community engagement and openness to new ways of working. Within that building there was everything you needed for a full curriculum: science, engineering, history, geography. There was enormous scope but we had to narrow it down, so we've started with art. What we have developed is a simple but effective creative curriculum. It builds on what's happening in the building and locally. We require our teams to work alongside the rolling exhibitions in their settings, to work with visiting artists so there is a real richness. If there are local creative festivals, we'll make sure we are involved.


We teach art thematically which means that every student can work on a totally different project and develop an original approach. The groups are often mixed in age, they are more like friendship groups based on shared attitudes and interests rather than focusing on age, key stage, experience and qualifications. Our emphasis is on


building and broadening skills and developing excellence, rather than remediation and plugging gaps.


We also focus on Preparation for Adulthood. This is hard to deliver if young people are still at school in the same setting as when they were 11. Here, they enter a building every day where they wear a lanyard, greet the person on reception, go to parts of the building closed to the public, navigate town to get their lunch and start moving into their adult life quite naturally. Some have work experience here and others may become interns. If they need extra support with speaking and social interaction, we can call on speech and communication specialists but in fact the way we work on projects through collaboration and peer mentoring develops these skills.


Do they get qualifications?


Most learners come for a full week, two days spent on art looking at different media, a digital art day and a day where they progress in English and maths. This might be functional skills or GCSE. We offer GCSE, AS and A level art and the Arts Award which has silver and gold levels, so it offers progression. This might appeal more to our students. It’s not that they're not capable of doing those more mainstream qualifications, but sometimes they need that alternative just because of the psychological barrier of GCSES which have caused such intense anxiety in their past.


How do students respond to this? Our students have the capacity for a fulfilling work life, but often when they come to us, they feel it's out of their reach. Some have been out of education for three or four years so it’s a challenge. Some will come with experience of alternative provision, but it is often assumed that because they have missed school, they have stopped learning. The work set for them is often not age appropriate. They go back to the basics of maths and English instead of moving on and finding ways to access the levels of language and numeracy that other children of their age are working on. English is more than spelling, handwriting and punctuation, especially in the workplace, and maths is not just fractions and decimals.


We have students who are so far down the line with their mental health issues, isolation and anxiety that they can never see themselves having friends or a working life. But time and again we see students who love art. They are out of school, but they have a sketchbook. While they have locked themselves away in their bedroom, they've taught themselves how to animate. This is the leverage to reach that group of young people,


January 2021 What do schools think?


It has been a challenge because schools and, local authorities can be risk averse. Quite understandably they want to take a close look at a new provider coming in with a completely different approach. One of the challenges is the creative curriculum itself. Some people begin by thinking it is a sort of community arts drop in, a hobby, but they come to appreciate that it is a robust learning pathway.


We do partner some schools and offer an extended transition for year 11. They refer the learner for three days and provide for them in school on the other two days. The qualifications that young people get with us will appear on the school’s data, and they value that. In return, we have the gift of extra time with a young person to support their progress.


What are your plans for the future? The project is not large scale but over six years we have moved on from one room in Macclesfield to five campuses across the northwest adding Manchester, Salford, Bolton and Rochdale. We are also expanding into Yorkshire and the Midlands, as a specialist post-16 Creative College. There is provision for children of statutory school age but it falls away quite suddenly after KS4. There is a huge gap for older learners and we feel we can create a full, purposeful pathway through to the world of work. Above all, we don't want these young people to withdraw into their bedrooms when they have made such amazing progress in so many areas of their lives.


Sal McKeown is a freelance journalist covering special needs, mental health and technology.


www.education-today.co.uk 29


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