Creative Collaborations: Ocean Park Academy

About the project

From January to June 2017, NTW TEAM Education was delighted to work with Ocean Park Academy in Splott, Cardiff on an Arts Council of Wales funded Creative Collaboration.  Wishing to show our support for the Welsh Assembly Government and Arts Council of Wales’ Creative Learning Through the Arts scheme, we applied TEAM’s successful engagement model to a project with learners from a centre for alternative education, offering them the opportunity to devise their own creative work.  Over two terms the pupils worked with TEAM members and creative professionals on a range of activities to provide a rich and varied creative learning experience.  We led philosophical discussions, movement workshops, Grime sessions, poetry writing classes, set design and building, soundscape composition, digital and tech workshops to enable the learners to create a piece to be shared with an audience.  They chose ideas of confinement and freedom as their theme and created a final sharing based on an ‘Escape Room’ experience.  All of the work created had multiple cross-curricular links, complementing GCSE and BTEC studies, raising pupil attainment and attendance and strengthening parental engagement by a significant margin, whilst perfectly demonstrating the importance and effectiveness of the Creative Learning Though the Arts model.