Kid Carpet Asks
RELEASE: 2021
What is creativity? What are your friends good at? What makes you happy and excited? What secret talents do you wish you had? What do you like doing?
I’ve got loads of questions about how we can provide a better creative education for young people, and in 2021 I decided I was going to ask them. I worked with my producing team and some other brilliant minds – Play:Disrupt, Abbi Bayliss, Malizah and Julia Head – to think up how best to do that.
Working closely with 3 Bristol Primary schools – May Park Primary, Victoria Park Primary and Headley Park Primary – I’ve been investigating what we’re not teaching kids that they desperately want to be able to do. Are we raising a generation of youtubers? Let’s teach them video skills. Do some kids want to be musicians like me? Let’s make that happen. Are there hundreds of poets out there waiting for a chance to speak? I’m going to give them a microphone.
We’ve worked hard to come up with methods that work in the context of the Covid Reality. We had posters, we had videos, we had workshops, we had magic golden envelopes and most importantly we had a team of secret investigators.
This is all in aid of my next big engagement project – my team and I are going to take the answers to these questions and make a programme that can go to any school, giving the pupils a chance to make work and exhibit it to the public online. These are brilliant artists and they deserve a chance to shine.
We will continue to work with our partner schools, but to make this next phase happen, we need more support. Can you bring something to this project? Do you have skills to share? Do you know of some funding that would be perfect for us? Can you get us into the room with decision makers and change makers? Can you give me a platform to tell people why it’s so important to give our youngest artists this opportunity? Does your school need this project? Get in touch.