With Queen Eleanor Primary Academy 2016-2017
Daniel Smith
Headteacher / Queen Eleanor Primary AcademyThis project has been all about what it adds to our school and there is no doubt that the additions have been significant – both in terms of professional capital and collective achievement.
The TIME Pilot had two aims: one was to find a way of Testing the Impact and Measuring the Effect (TIME) of our school projects which have for 20 years embraced commissioning new work with and for young people, supported by cross-curricular resources. The other was to explore working with a school to develop their arts offering through a combination of enhancing teachers’ skills and broadening their approach to embedding the arts across the curriculum.
We discovered Queen Eleanor Primary Academy through our relationship with Creative Education Trust and began the project with a Trench Brothers residency so they could experience the benefits of a comprehensive ready-made arts project:
Student
We have never had such an experience and were surprised that we were able to create something like that.
The first phase of the project was some skills development sessions in which each class worked with Musician and Composer John Webb, Director Freya Wynn-Jones and Artist Ruth Paton on activities which linked into their current curriculum learning.
Daniel Smith
/ Headteacher / Queen Eleanor Primary AcademyThe initial workshops helped to focus the teachers on the importance of skill development within the more creative subjects as well as to get to know their classes better as budding artists, musicians and actors.
The second phase of TIME was for the school to develop its own project supported by guest artist visits and for this, they chose to focus on their school values and vision and find ways of expressing these through the arts with a view to creating a permanent record and display. We chose to explore a range of genres through music and the visual arts, and create art works to be displayed across the school together with songs representing each value and vision.
Each class/Year group was allocated a value or vision and chose ways to represent this through art forms including collage, painting, sculpture, designing a pop-up book, animated cartoon, stop motion, photography and puppetry and worked with a specialist in each field. Having chosen a musical genre including pop, jazz, gospel, rap and soft rock they devised lyrics based on their theme and worked with composers to set their words to music and create a song. The final phase was to learn their songs and work with Music Director Jenny Gould to rehearse and record them in Lodge Recording Studios, an experience they all thoroughly enjoyed.
The results are to be found in QEPA’s Fantastic Book of Values, snapshots of which can be seen below:
Art projects ranged from building a rhino sculpture to demonstrate Resilience…
to collaborative collages to celebrate Collaboration…
as well as photography, puppetry and animation.
Year 2 were given Endeavour as their value and they chose to represent this through an animation about their class mascot, Engelburt the Elephant. They decided to use the character to demonstrate how endeavour fits in with their daily lives at Queen Eleanor Primary Academy.
Film Maker – Stacey Hembury
Composer & Pianist – Jenny Gould
For HMDT Music the project was a valuable opportunity to evaluate our methodology in detail and assess its impact, as well as to develop it through CPD training to enhance teachers’ skills, an experience we will be expanding and replicating in TIME Extended.
