Grants awarded: September 2024
The 28 grants described here have been awarded between July and September 2024 and total over £3.73 million.
Artists from the Colour Foundry are working with SEND specialist and mainstream schools in and around Huddersfield to support teachers in learning through traditional and digital arts. Now in its second year, Katrina Whale, programme lead from Castle Hill School in Huddersfield, reveals some of the complexities and the joys of working across multiple art forms and settings, as part of their Teacher Development Fund project.
As we start the second year of our Teacher Development Fund journey, our creative team do so with their eyes and ears wide open. They are continuing to seek out ways to provide relevant experiences that unlock and support our teachers’ individual creativity. The team, made up of artists from The Colour Foundry, has a strong belief that teachers need space and opportunities to develop and fuel their creativity. They maintain that through these, they will gain knowledge, skills and insight enabling them to plan and deliver quality creative experiences within the classroom.
We launched the second year of Parallel Rhythms with a Creative Gathering, a day of experiencing and making artwork. We recognise the start of the new academic year is an extremely busy time with multiple demands. We planned our gathering to be a chance for our teachers to come up for air, to play and to be reminded of what it feels like to be focused on creating. We held our Gathering in a studio space within the beautiful walled garden at Cannon Hall Country Park and Museum enabling teachers to take a step away from the school environment. We wanted colleagues to have the headspace to enjoy the surroundings and experience the wonderful De Morgan exhibition within the museum that was to form the inspiration for the day of making ahead.
We were not long into our day before everyone was fully absorbed in trying out new art materials, techniques and ways of working. Comments were flying around the room about how it feels to have the space to be making, how relaxing the activities were and how individual and exciting everyone’s work was. It was lovely to observe everyone finding their flow.
As the day ended, we asked teachers to consider what, if anything, they would like to take forward into their classroom settings. These jotted thoughts on scraps of drawing paper will form key elements of each teacher’s individual journey during our second year of the project. Our Creative Gatherings have been some of the richest moments of growth for the teachers. It would be wonderful to fill the project with them, but there is the ever-present challenge of getting teachers released from their classroom commitments.
The first year of the Parallel Rhythms project was a whirlwind of creative experiences for teachers alongside their children inside the classroom. The time the teachers and artists have had getting to know one another has led us to a point where we can focus on responding to the individual interests and needs of each teacher.
As our project involves the challenging yet interesting mix of working with four mainstream and two SEND schools, alongside our offer of art, music, and digital technology, it has thrown up plenty of planning challenges for the artists. From the project’s inception, these factors have dictated that we would be offering different content to both types of schools, although we did anticipate there would be a good deal of duplication of activity from one school/teacher to the next. What I don’t think we fully appreciated was that our desire to meet all our teachers’ interests and needs would take us on such a variety of journeys. At times it feels like we are delivering 12 separate projects, one for each teacher — this has become both the challenge and the joy of Parallel Rhythms.
The 28 grants described here have been awarded between July and September 2024 and total over £3.73 million.
Our Director of Grants, Abdou Sidibe, examines the results of our most recent racial justice audit.