Education

Vision statement:

Education should fire the imagination, make the pulse race and the colours around us look brighter. It should make us want to reach further, see more distant horizons and demand transformation in all we do. It should allow us to illuminate what we know and understand what we don’t.

Our education work will be a sustained force – an imaginative and illuminating presence filling every available space from schools and community centres, to venues and public spaces. It will be a celebration of creativity, of the communities and of the region and the development of high-quality international artistic exchange. It will inspire and engage everyone involved, providing high quality education work for the largest possible proportion of the community on a range of levels. Everybody involved should have the opportunity to be transformed and energised by the experience.

In 2006 the Festival started to deliver Creative Partnerships in schools in Great Yarmouth. This government funded scheme aims to place creativity firmly in the schools’ curriculum and enable teachers to teach creatively in all subjects. We currently have a number of bespoke projects in 8 core schools as well as a large scale project combining 11 schools, a company of engineers, visual artists and performers. The culmination of Bionic Bugs! will be seen in Great Yarmouth on May 1st and in Norwich on the opening day of the Festival May 4th.

The education team are currently developing a programme of work related to the festival events. This will start in 2008 with a series of workshops by members of the Philharmonia orchestra in four schools in Norwich. We will also be bringing over a percussion band from Brazil who will run workshops in schools prior to their performance at the festival in May.