‘The Wall Face education programme was an innovative approach to using the Arts Award on a heritage related project – and it is a sign of its success that a whole of the school’s key stage 3 gained Arts Award Bronze through participating in it. A key element of its success lay in the way the co-ordinator brought all the venues together to deliver the programme.’

Bill Griffiths, Head of Programmes, Tyne and Wear Museums

147 teenagers achieved their Bronze Arts Award through working with eleven Hadrian’s Wall museums, three artists and a dispersed exhibition of portraits of antiquarians loaned from the National Portrait Gallery and supported by Culture Bridge North East.

Funded by the Arts Council, I used their Arts Award model to extend this programme beyond the original concept of creating a learning resource  based on the National Portrait Gallery’s loan collection of Hadrian’s Wall antiquarian portraits. I took the three years of KS3 from Haydon Bridge High School to visit all eleven Hadrian’s Wall Museums, and then brought three artists into school to develop the student’s skills.

The students worked on their Bronze Arts Award for the full academic year, which culminated in a cross-curricular creativity week.  Wall Face experience inspired work in PE, Science, Music, Modern Foreign Languages, English and Technology.

The online learning resources based on the National Portrait Gallery antiquarian portraits and the objects from the Roman Sites’ collections are available here.

The final element of the Learning Programme was to create a portal for the wall-wide learning      offer, showcasing the richness and diversity of sites, objects and subjects that the World Heritage Site offers.

http://hadrianswallcountry.co.uk/learning