PLAY ON!

Our beloved Cheltenham Festivals have been put on hold during the coronavirus crisis – but they’re as busy as ever! Their creative education work has been providing solace for young and old alike during lockdown. July is traditionally Cheltenham Music Festival month: Katie Jarvis spoke with Ali Mawle, the festivals’ director of learning and public engagement, about how we can all benefit from their work

- Katie Jarvis

Ali, tell us about your education programmes and why you decided to release them to a wider audience.

Our education programmes always respond to a specific local or national need within the industries we work in – music, literature and science. Although much of our work is with children and schools, we know the creative arts can be brilliant for the well-being of people of any age – and promoting well-being has become more important than ever during the lockdown. So this crisis has given us the opportunity to make our programmes– such as our workshops – more widely available.

More detail, please!

Caleb Parkin is writer-in-residence on our Beyond Words programme for teenagers who are unable to attend school through mental or physical illness. He had already been making digital content for children too sick to leave their homes, so we were easily able to adapt his creative writing workshops to suit a broader audience – anyone, anywhere of any age. We have been putting them out for free on our YouTube channel [link on opposite page] as part of our Well-Being Wednesdays.

We also have Musical Mondays, where we’ve produced digital bite-size pieces introducing a specific instrument or instrument family, or a particular aspect of music – pulse, rhythm or harmony, for example. They’re also freely available online.

Your education programmes aren’t just a welcome curriculum extra: they change children’s lives…