“The arts can play a crucial role in improving students’ abilities to learn, because they draw on a range of intelligences and learning styles”

The ‘SPARK’ initiative is a Big Lottery Fund project currently developed and implemented through a successful partnership involving the Western Education and Library Board and the Verbal Arts Centre. The aim of the project is to help ‘at-risk’, disengaged and excluded young people become more able to re-engage and progress in their personal, social, vocational and academic lives.

The programme began in Spring 2003 with the express intention of providing a series of courses, to students at Key Stage 4, which addressed a range of issues including personal and social development, ICT and creative and expressive activities.

SPARK is about engaging young people in a series of creative learning workshops that aim to give them the means to explore many important personal, social and educational issues. The programmes offered are as much about ‘learning in’ as ‘learning through’ the creative art forms. Activities are delivered in a non-formal way so as to break the negative perceptions that most disaffected young people have about learning.

To date 45 short modular courses have been drawn from the creativity menu and successfully delivered by the Verbal Arts Centre in the Western Education and Library Board area to over 220 beneficiaries.