Carnival, Culture and Creativity

Creative Partnerships at the Centre for Community Engagement - Sussex and Surrey

Rye College is an 11-18 co-education comprehensive in the small market town of Rye on the edge of Romney Marsh in East Sussex and serves an extensive, largely rural catchment area as well as the town of Rye numbering some 15,000 people.

Project objectives

As the focus for its Creative Partnerships work the college chose carnival arts as a catalyst for cross-curricular work, community cohesion and international links.

Who was involved?

Jessie Martlehof-Johnson and practitioners from Kinetica Carnival Arts

Impact

In the last two years, Rye’s development of carnival arts has been a far-reaching and dynamic project involving the local community in both designing and making elements of the project. (The Mayor of Rye has been involved in costume sewing sessions!)

The project is structured to involve work within the usual time structure of the college as well as timetable ‘drop days’. While the processes of planning and doing are seen to be the paramount creative processes, the college has, for the last two years, held a carnival event in Rye and contributed to the Brighton Festival Children’s Parade. The degree to which this project serves the community cohesion aims of the college can be seen in the possibility of Rye becoming a ‘Fairtrade’ town as a result of the Creative Partnerships work.

The carnival work has created a great deal of autonomy for the young people involved – they raised £3,000 during the year towards a legacy fund for the project. The college became part of the Olympic initiative ‘Create, Compete, Collaborate’ and has linked with a school in France on work around the Paralympics.

Following an Ofsted inspection in June 2010 the college received an overall judgment of ‘good’, with the community cohesion element of the inspection yielding a garde of '1' (outstanding). The Headteacher is sure that this was, in large part, due to the Creative Partnerships work in the college.

Feedback from young people

"I love the fact that I had to make the decisions, then if it went wrong, I had to solve it because then I learned from this...its easy just to copy someone/something"

"I understand that the Fairtrade theme helped us make links across lessons, in science we made anatomically correct bee sculptures, it was hard work but they look amazing, I am so proud of what I have done"

"that was a nightmare, we`ve never worked so hard, concentrated so much, been so calm on the outside and falling apart inside, been so scared and excited all at the same time, and loved it!"

Feedback from teachers

"It was the best day ever, everyone was in a great mood, even teachers that you don’t see smile that often were really enjoying themselves"

"We have learnt so much about Fairtrade and the practitioners really helped bring it all together creatively"

"The practitioners also learnt with us; we researched together"

Results

Rye is in the last year of a three year Creative Partnerships Change School programme. Carnival arts have become engrained as a vehicle for school improvement and the college fully intend to carry the work on after the end of the Creative Partnerships programme.