Excelsior Academy receives Artsmark Gold Award

Excelsior Academy receives prestigious Artsmark Award

Pupils and staff at Excelsior are celebrating after receiving a prestigious Gold Artsmark Award.

Artsmark is the only creative quality standard for schools, accredited by Arts Council England. It supports them to develop and celebrate arts and cultural education across the whole curriculum, bringing learning to life for children and young people.

To achieve their Artsmark Award, Excelsior Academy had to develop their arts and cultural provision to embed a broad and ambitious curriculum. This was achieved by creating an overall plan that was committed to and delivered across the whole school.

The Artsmark assessor commended:

'Excelsior Academy has a deep commitment to the power of the arts to support your pupils’ personal development and learning. Your Artsmark journey has occurred during a period of change in leadership and staffing and against the backdrop of resulting changes of direction. While it is not entirely clear how priorities have changed, you have made some notable developments. Art, Music and Drama are now taught throughout KS3, leading to a stronger uptake of arts GCSEs. What are the GCSE and post-GCSE options? What is the uptake of different qualifications? We hear very little at all about your arts provision for your younger pupils or about the use of the arts to support learning across the KS1 and KS2 curriculum. Overall it is difficult, without such descriptions and evidence, to grasp what your range of offer is and what the curriculum design is that guarantees provision and progression and quality throughout. This is something you might address in future. You might also consider how you will capture evidence of the impact of your developments as you look to advocate for the arts across your trust and beyond. An excellent example of this is your outline of the Rap based intervention in response to gang violence and county lines, which saw suspensions reduced to nil and vulnerable children discovering and exploring their voice through music. You have engaged with creative practitioners and arts organisations, continuing your collaboration with New Writing North. The Y9 multilingual translation and adaptation of poetry from diverse cultures, resulting in the ‘Me and My City’ anthology, sounds wonderful, as do other initiatives such as ‘Balance the Books’, the work of your LGBTQIA+ group and your ‘Develop Your Voice’ group which was recognised in the North East Culture Awards. Your commitment to reflecting and celebrating diversity is powerful and important. The opportunities you give to older pupils to use their creativity in the arts to explore and give voice to issues that concern them are significant. It would be good, going forward, to further develop your pupils’ opportunities to devise and deliver their own performances throughout the school and to involve all pupils in planning and decision-making about the range of arts experiences and learning that reflect their lived experience. Your engagement of the Voices of Virtue Gospel Choir as artists in residence is inspiring and will strengthen your links to your community. Your future plans include completing your planned cultural-historical map, developing dance, exploring music therapy and producing your Winter Anthology. You have established high profile creative practitioners as ‘Friends of Excelsior’ and it will be good to consider how this, along with further connections to arts providers and networks, might enhance CPD and enrich your pupils’ experiences. We look forward greatly to hearing of how you continue to foster the arts and how this impacts on all your pupils’ learning and their lives.'

On receiving the award, James Andriot, Headteacher said:

“I'd like to thank Holly Knox, Michael Davison, the arts team at Excelsior Academy and governor William Messer for their recent successful bid for us to attain Artsmark Gold. Their submission recognises the deep commitment to the power of the arts to support pupils' personal development and learning. Thanks to the hard work of the Artsmark steering group, the strength of the arts at Excelsior has been recognised through this prestigious national award.”

Dr Darren Henley OBE, Chief Executive of the Arts Council, said:

“I would like to congratulate Excelsior Academy on their Artsmark Award. Becoming an Artsmark school demonstrates that through offering a broad, ambitious and creative curriculum, young people have the opportunity to develop character and resilience, increasing their knowledge, curiosity and skills that will remain with them through to adult life.”