Summer Arts College Success
This summer a group of young people from Sheffield Youth Justice Service spent 3 weeks developing their creative skills with the aim of achieving their Arts Awards.
Summer Arts Colleges are proven to:
- Increase educational engagement
- Facilitate transition to mainstream education and employment
- Reduce rates of reoffending
- Significantly improve literacy and numeracy
- Offer accreditation through 3 levels of Arts Awards (Discover, Explore and Bronze)
Over ten years Unitas has run Summer Arts Colleges with over a third of Youth Justice Services in England and Wales. SACs work to a standard model, delivering high quality arts provision to some of the most challenged and challenging young people.
Arts Award is a range of unique qualifications that supports anyone aged up to 25 to grow as artists and arts leaders, inspiring them to connect with and take part in the wider arts world through taking challenges in an art form - from fashion to digital art, pottery to poetry.
In Sheffield our young people engaged in a wide range of activities such as printing, painting, writing and creating music and worked towards completion of 3 levels of Arts Awards.
Sheffield Youth Justice Service commissioned a participatory arts organisation called TiPP to deliver the arts program for our young people. TiPP seek to have a positive impact on family and social relationsips, self-identity, literacy and oracy levels and employment prospects. Their projects develop practical and social skills and provide participants with a challenge, offering people new perspectives and a changed focus. Their work with young people has a clear focus on progression and aims to help them successfully re-enter mainstream education or training.
A central theme of Arts Award is to encourage people to participate in a wide range of artisitc disciplines as both a creator and an audience member. On our Summer Arts College this year we took trips to venues such as The Lyceum Theatre, The Crucible, The Millennium Gallery and Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
Sheffield YJS and TiPP worked together with local artists to create a program to inspire and motivate our young people. Writing workshops were delivered by published author Emma Pass, printing workshops were run by painter and prinmaker Duncan Pass, and recording studio sessions were run by Mike Thompson - musician, DJ and owner of SHeffield based social enterprise RiteTrax.
