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Insider Solutions
Case Studies 2005 - Amplifier Suffolk
Amplifier provides 700 workshops a year in 28 teaching venues across Suffolk. Around 300 people attend our sessions each week. We employ a team of 40 tutors and 7 peer mentors. The music workshops are aimed at young people aged 11-18 and offer tuition in rock, pop, club and folk music. When? October 2004 to July 2007
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The Junction, Cambridge
What paid staff took part and what were their roles? We have a project director, project officer, senior tutor and 40 tutors. How many volunteers took part and what were their roles? No volunteers are taking part, we feel that artists are valued members of society so everyone should be paid even the peer mentors. What was the aim of the project?
The main focus of the project is centred around building capacity and training 40 tutors who will continue to work with young people after the project ends. We also aim to help young people todevelop through enhancing their self-esteem and increasing their confidence. Lifelong learning and promoting social inclusion are our two key policy links. However we are also addressing the Arts Council aims "To change people's lives through the opportunity to take part in or experience high-quality arts activities". How did the young people get involved? An extensive marketing campaign using posters, flyers and press. Our campaign used role models from the area who have gone on to have successful careers in the music business. We also gave demonstrations at school assemblies in areas where the take-up was low. We have frequent showcase events that we treat as marketing opportunities where we can give information to potential participants. The planning process included conversations with a range of stakeholders: the clients, our project team and the views of young people who took part in a pilot programme. Following this consultation period we worked out a provisional programme of events and worked out the costs to a rough budget. We set out a timeline with key dates for decisions or for activities to take place and set out a timetable for the first term. All this information was then put together in a three-year business plan which included an implementation and logistical plan to enable the delivery of the project. A series of 700 rock, pop, club and folk music workshops in 28 venues across Suffolk. The sessions last between 2-4 hours and are open to anyone aged 11-18 with an interest in music. We take a stock of equioment for people who don't have their own so they can have a go themselves. We use two or three tutors at each venue. The participants are split up either into smaller groups by their standard of musicianship or by instrument type. The tutors can do either group work or individual tuition. At each centre we have a surprise half hour where we demonstrate skills like song writing, soloing, DJ-ing or where we introduce other music like classical Indian, Samba or African drumming. We don't tell the young people what specialist session is on as if they think they might have to sing, for example, they simply won't turn up so we don't tell them! This has worked really well and all the participants engage fully with the surprise session. Partnerships between youth work and the arts? Many of our venues are youth service centres or independent youth clubs. We work closely with youth workers as a great deal of good youth work can be done at our workshops. Young people some how open up when they make music and it often brings issues to the surface that may otherwise be buried or repressed. Our tutors are not youth workers and do not have the skills needed to deal with these instances so having trained and experienced youth workers on hand is very important. We hope to increase our steering group to include a manager fro the youth service. How was the project evaluated? Internally we use the Felicity Woolfe method of evaluation but our external evaluators - Cultural Intelligence - have also established an evaluation strategy for the project based on their own methods. Project Outcomes: We can access all the information relating to the project outcomes and test the actual figures against our predictions. Participant Outcomes: Our evaluation plan features a base line survey and tutors assessment form for each new starter. We also have an exit survey for each finisher. In between entry and exit we conduct regulat interviews with the participants and many of the session are audio entry and exit or video recorded. We have video diaries and gather anonymous feedback via the website. Too early to say but we can already see that a number of potentially great musicians who are overlooked at school and who have not had a chance to play music before are rising to the surface and are taking an active role in playing or DJ-ing. Amplifier has been incredibly successful in recruiting and training 'resting' musicians who are now becoming key figures in their communities through the workshops, where as before they were not even know known. Suffolk Local Authorities: £125,000 Arts Council England: £125,000 Grants for the Arts (ACE Lottery): £162,000 Crime & Disorder Prevention Panels (Home Office): £14,000 Trusts & Sponsorship: £40,000 Self-generated income: £20,000 ESF (objective 3): £59,000 Why was this a good piece of work with young people? Rock, pop and club music is the biggest participatory art form in the UK. It is particulary popular amongst people from low-income families yet it receives the least funding of all arts forms. Young people are genuinely passionate about music, offering them a chance to take part, sometimes for the first time, is fantastic and watching them progress to performing in front of their peers is superb. Increasing self-confidence is not easy but it can be done through music projects like ours. Popular music can transform the lives of young people. We have engaged some young people that almost everyone else had given up on! How were young people's achievements recognised? We had local showcase events at the end of each term. The best of the bands were invited to play at two county-wide events; Permission to Rock at The Corn Exchange in Ipswich and on the open air Amplifier Stage at the Ipswich music day. These bands also had features in local press.
Details provided by: Richard Brown, Head of Music
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