Cultural Offer Pilot Scheme Applications

The Cultural Offer is intended to provide all children and young people with five hours per week of high quality arts and cultural activities in and out of school.

Culture enriches lives. Participation in cultural activities can have a significant impact on young people's development. This has been shown repeatedly in international studies, and has also been backed up by recent evaluations of major programmes such as Creative Partnerships and Museums' Strategic Commissioning. What these evaluations have shown is that culture can help young people achieve all of the Every Child Matters outcomes.

As well as being valuable and enjoyable in its own right, participation in cultural activities also gives young people the chance to develop important life skills such as creativity, confidence, self-discipline, effective communication and the ability to work in teams.

These skills are particularly important in a world of rapid technological and social change where the cultural and creative industries are increasingly important to our economic future.  These industries already account for 7.3% of all economic activity in the UK, contributing £60 billion to the economy, and this is only going to grow.

The Government are seeking expressions of interest from partnerships wishing to explore how this could be achieved. The deadline for submitting an expression of interest is April 7 2008.

As a minimum young people should have access to a range of the following opportunities:

• attending top quality theatre, orchestral and dance performances
• visiting and engaging with national and local exhibitions, galleries, and museums
• visiting heritage sites, significant contemporary buildings and public spaces
• opportunities to engage creatively with library and archive services
• learning a musical instrument
• playing music or singing in ensembles
• taking part in theatre and dance performances
• producing a piece of creative writing, taking part in a reading group, or listening to authors talk about their work
• learning about and making films, digital or new media art and making a piece of visual arts or crafts

The full prospectus for applications can be downloaded here.

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