An alternative education programme in Darlington is extending musical opportunities for local young people with the help of a four-figure grant from a regional employer.
Blackbird Creative Arts runs the Key Stage Door project, which gives local young people who are struggling with school attendance the chance to keep learning and building their self-confidence in a different environment.
The twice-weekly Key Stage Door sessions, which take place in partnership with the Darlington Hippodrome, include a range of different arts and performance classes, including dance, singing, music and theatre skills.
Classes are delivered by a team of expert tutors and enable the 11-16 year-old participants to work towards achieving Bronze & Silver Arts Awards qualifications offered by Trinity College of London.
To extend the creative opportunities that Key Stage Door provides, Blackbird Creative Arts has now used a £2,000 grant from the Banks Group’s Banks Community Fund to buy new musical instruments and equipment for the students to try out, practice on and perform with, including guitars, percussion instruments, amps, microphones and a PA system.
Blackbird Creative Arts was founded in 2019 by performing arts professionals Sarah Wilson and Jade Sloan, who are also both parents of children with special educational needs.
They set up Key Stage Door last year after identifying the need for local families to get more support in dealing with reduced or non-attendance at school due to emotional, mental health, neurodiversity or well-being issues.
The programme is designed to help improve students’ self-belief, focus, communication skills, teamwork, emotional expression, well-being and self-regulation, with the extra confidence that several of them have built up by taking part helping them get back into mainstream education.
Key Stage Door is backed by Darlington Council, with students coming to the Hippodrome on Thursdays and Fridays from schools right across the town.
Jade Sloan says: “Creative expression is really important for everyone’s well-being, but for young people who are often struggling with multiple issues that lead to emotionally-based school avoidance, it can become even more essential and impactful.
“Our aim is to use the arts to help turn students who are feeling isolated and excluded into more confident people who feel capable, creative and valued, and it’s been brilliant to see this happening with many of our students over recent months as they’ve found and developed a range of talents that they often didn’t even know they had.
“We’ve had lots of positive feedback from our students and their families, and we maintain lots of contact with parents and carers to make sure they know how much their children are putting into and getting out of their sessions with us.
“The support we’ve had from both Darlington Council and the Hippodrome has been crucial in enabling us to deliver a service that we knew was desperately needed in the town, and we’re now working to maximise the positive impacts that it can provide for local young people in the future.
“We’ve had to borrow musical instruments where we could up to now, so having our own resources available to use whenever we want is going to make a big difference to our work and we’re really grateful to the Banks Group for helping us bring them in.”
Banks is the business behind the proposed Beaumont Hill residential development to the north of Darlington, which would see up to 600 homes on a 35-hectare site to the south of the River Skerne that identified for residential development in the 2022 Darlington Borough Local Plan.
Substantial areas of public open space, a small retail convenience store unit and a range of biodiversity enhancements also feature in the project design.
Kate Culverhouse, community relations manager at the Banks Group, adds: “Key Stage Door is already making a hugely positive impact on the lives of its students and their families, and we hope this grant give them the opportunity to achieve even more.”
The Banks Group’s community funds are independently managed by Point North (formerly the County Durham Community Foundation).
Anyone from a community close to a Banks Group project who is interested in applying for funding from the Banks Community Fund should contact the company via its website enquiry form (www.banksgroup.co.uk/contact-us/) to find out if their group or project is eligible.