Young at Art

Young at Art (YAA) is one of Northern Ireland’s leading children’s arts charity, and the home of the Belfast Children’s Festival. Alongside the festival, YAA run a year-long programme of education and engagement activity with schools throughout Belfast and across Northern Ireland (NI) — focused in some of the country’s more deprived wards. YAA believes passionately that every child should have the right to access exciting and original creative experiences across arts disciplines, regardless of who they are or where they come from. We use a child-led, process-based approach that places the participant at the centre of the work and allows for their ideas, opinions, and creativity to be valued. Our aim is to build confidence, imaginative skills and critical thinking in our participants through high quality artistic experiences.

Each year we offer a range of CPD opportunities for both teachers and student teachers to develop their skills in the critical appraisal of performance and support them in engaging with pupils through the creative arts. However, working with Paul Hamlyn Foundation on the Teacher Development Fund has enabled us to take this further. Using the Creative Child project (a programme of direct creative engagement with nursery and primary children) as our starting point, we developed our TDF project, the Creative Teacher. Our aim is to provide a bespoke programme of teacher/​artists mentoring in arts-based learning focused on child-led process-based methodology. Creative Teacher is our first project that is focused directly on influencing teaching methods and encouraging the use of art and drama throughout curricular teaching. This has allowed us to embed our practice more deeply into our partner schools, and upskill teachers in their arts-based learning approach, whilst providing sustained support through artist engagement to allow their confidence in this teaching method to grow.

The delivery of Creative Teacher was altered significantly due to Covid-19 restrictions and our intended start date of September was delayed until January 2021. Our team of eight artists (four visual artists, four actors/​drama facilitators) worked in teams (one visual artist, one drama facilitator) meeting with their assigned teachers virtually to begin the project.

From this difficult starting point to now, our incredible team of artists and teachers have had 110 sessions together, online and in-person. We have also hosted three in-person training days with the full cohort of teachers, learning and working together with our artist team. Even with the challenges Covid brought to the project, the majority of teachers stayed absolutely committed and have developed a great relationship with their artist team. We have been able to see the confidence of our teachers grow, and their teaching methods actively changing.

Several of the teachers on the project have stepped into the role of ​‘arts co-ordinator’ for their school since beginning Creative Teacher, which has helped to embed this practice throughout the school.

Working towards our project end in June 2023, our artists are working with their teachers to encourage sharing amongst their peers, and toward an end-of-year celebration of the work of Creative Teacher — a chance to showcase their work to their peers, and embed this practice throughout the school community. In addition, YAA has been invited by some of the creative teachers to deliver our CPD training to the entire staff in order to give an introduction to the whole staff so they can continue to implement these creative methods further.

The flexibility PHF has allowed us during this really difficult time of delivery has been invaluable — and has had a deep and positive impact on the teachers we are working with. In being able to continue to support these teachers during Covid, it has deepened the relationship and trust with our artists, and also gave them a toolkit of creative techniques to use in the challenging teaching time of Covid, and the return to in-class learning.