Gloucestershire Libraries experience of Arts Award
Anne Careless, Team Manager at Tewkesbury Library talks to us about her experience of running developing Arts Award at the Library.
It was a lovely autumn afternoon in Matson, September 2018 when I started my Arts Award journey. At Tewkesbury Library we have a good number of D of E students - usually at least ten at a time - and I’d been looking for a way to provide an extra dimension to their volunteering; I was hoping the afternoon’s training session would be a really positive way forward with this.
“Welcome to our training session for Arts Award Discover & Explore,” said our trainer. I had one of those moments where I needed to make a very quick adjustment to my thinking. How was I going to incorporate training as an Arts Award Adviser for Discover and Explore with my library role, when I’d been anticipating Bronze upwards? The challenge began…
For the next year I worked with my team and our D of E students to see if they could help deliver Discover to a group of children in the library.
We struggled with the D of E volunteering hours (total of 13 for D of E Bronze) – they didn’t provide enough time to plan and deliver all the activities for a group of children. Looking back now I think that may well have been because we were all still very new to Arts Award. If we had focussed on them delivering a part each, possibly working in pairs, then I reckon we could have made that work. As a staff team, although we liked the idea of delivering Arts Award, we didn’t feel we had the ongoing capacity to run sessions on a regular basis ourselves so were a bit stuck.
And then came the turning point…
…and then…there was a Gloucestershire wide Arts Award meeting at The Everyman Theatre in December 2019 which I was invited to attend on behalf of Gloucestershire Libraries. This was a real turning point for me. I was able to meet other Arts Award Advisers and hear about the way they delivered Arts Award in their settings. Inspired by this and knowing Tewkesbury Library had already arranged with a number of local schools to run workshops on The Tempest for Shakespeare Week, I talked to one of my local primary schools – Deerhurst & Apperley – about using our library workshop as a creative activity that could contribute to a Discover Arts Award.
This lit the touch paper! Not only did Library staff end up delivering creative workshops on The Tempest to the whole school (to keep this in perspective it is a small school with under 100 pupils!) but the teachers showed me explorations that pupils had done in their Art lessons on famous painters; they had studied their lives and emulated their techniques to create artwork of their own. The library provided a further activity sheet about different art forms for class discussion and for the pupils to fill in. The children had all been involved in sharing their experiences via class discussions about the painters and The Tempest workshops.
I had arranged to spend some time at the school talking with a group of pupils from each class to see how they had found their Arts Award experience with a view to consolidating a system to use with other local schools. Deerhurst & Apperley School was looking at getting some of the staff trained so they could continue and deliver Explore. Just as we thought we might have had a way to roll out Arts Award Discover to more local schools, the first Lockdown was announced and my Arts Award journey had veered off down a tunnel.
Finding a way through Lockdown
The end of the tunnel appeared like a speck in the distance a few months later when I heard from Louise Bardgett (Create Gloucestershire). She was working with Trinity College and organisations in Gloucestershire to pilot Arts Award Discover at Home, an online version of Discover. This could be accessed by parents while Covid restrictions prevented organisations running face to face activities for children and young people.
Organisations across the county were invited to provide “Creative Challenges” – online creative workshops – that families could access. Gloucestershire Libraries contributed four challenges, a creative coding challenge from our Innovation Lab, a modelling workshop, a creative writing opportunity and “Make-aways”.
Make-aways had been devised for children to pick up from Libraries during the Summer Reading Challenge at a time when we were offering Click & Collect services. They are simple creative craft activities such as Libraries might normally put out as a drop in activity during a holiday period, but all materials and instructions were bagged up ready to take away. As well as providing an activity for Arts Award Discover, these were available to all children whether or not they had online access. We also printed out all the other online items that parents without computer access might need.
There was a lot of interest in Make-aways at Tewkesbury Library and a good number of parents also picked up Log books and “Maps” to guide them through the process. We suggested that those who could access computers could share the children’s creative achievements on Gloucestershire Libraries’ Children’s Facebook page or that they could come back and tell us how they’d got on, show us their creations. Although a couple of hundred Make-aways went home over the summer, no-one had used our Library challenges or physical Make-aways to complete an Arts Award Discover which was frustrating.
Refining the offer
With the support of the Libraries’ Development Team we regrouped and had another launch at half term with a more structured approach along the lines of the Summer Reading Challenge. We hoped that using a similar process – a new section of the challenge set on each of three visits and then a certificate – plus Libraries being open to the public for some weeks would help families complete the challenge. We were rewarded just before Christmas with our first Library based completer! …and then we were Locked down again.
We have all had to create and recreate ways of delivering creative experiences over this pandemic. Whether any or all of our current plans for delivery will reach many families at the moment, I can’t tell. What I do know is that we won’t stop trying; this journey isn’t over.
Anne Careless, Tewkesbury Library
Gloucestershire Libraries , February 2021
Find out more about Discover at Home and the Creative Challenges on our Arts Award page