I’m an apprentice – get me into there!

The creative industries, that is.  So this week is National Apprentice Week, woohoo!  Over at Creative Alliance we now deliver about a quarter of all creative apprenticeships in the UK, training young people to enter the creative industries by arranging placements with artists and arts organisations, and offering support to apprentices and employers in the process.  Boring stuff, eh?  But wait – what is actually going on here?

Traditionally the creative industries have very much been the preserve of the middle classes, of graduates from higher education and Tabitha Ffforbes -Smythe while she waits for her trust fund to mature.  It’s always been a hard nut to crack for those who don’t have the education, support or contacts, for those who are a bit less well off (I know, I was that soldier).  So, when the apprenticeships came back on the agenda a year or so ago, we  saw an opportunity to change things.  We put a programme together specifically targeted at those without the aforementioned advantages – now on our second ‘cohort’, the programme is a resounding success with the participants.  It is very heartening seeing the commitment these young people are putting into the opportunity – many of whom never dreamed that they would be able to get access to the industry (this is the issue many of them have fedback to us – they just couldn’t see a ‘way in’ to the creative industries, before the apprenticeships came up).

Anyway, we wanted to mark National Apprentice Week in some way, to celebrate the success of the (mainly) young people on the programme.  So we asked the apprentices themselves to come up with something – and with their new-found confidence they were happy to oblige – so this is what they did.

In ‘flashmob’ stylee, they rocked up in various places in town, and lined up with their ‘haha I’m an apprentice’ tees out and proud (it was pretty cold on the day as well, bless ‘em).  People would stop and ask them what they were up to, and they’d tell them all about the programme and what they were getting out of it – a lovely piece of PR for Creative Alliance, all the more lovely because it came from the participants themselves.