Culture and the Arts: I have many links in this area with well-known musicians and performers who are transformative and life affirming and in my experience they have been proven to build confidence and self esteem within young people and they would also contribute significantly to the personal development and cultural capital strands for the new OFSTED framework. Having worked with many bands and performers, I am still approached on a weekly basis by management companies offering artists for schools.  I have worked with Kate Tempest and Akala as well as over 200 well known artists and can easily facilitate concerts at your school for free and please see attached a concert log linked to key identified criteria for success and entry into these events.

Spiritual experiences: I have a lot of connections with local faith communities. I have organised religious trips to Jewish Synagogues in Ramsgate, Krakow, Prague, the Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden, the Gurdwara in Gravesend and to the Buddhist retreat centre in Hertfordshire. I have also worked with artists of faith and no faith to collaborate in various school settings. I have organised many self awareness days which brought practitioners of Yoga, mindfulness, Tai Chi, Zumba, Bollywood dance and culture to inspire and to engage. I have worked with international companies such as Starbucks to speak about fair trade and their social and corporate responsibility to the communities they work with. I have worked with Jermain Jackman from The Voice to talk about engaged faith and politics. , I have worked with Akala and Robert Beckford to look at Black history and spirituality and I have also written about RE as a transformative practice by exploring it links to popular urban culture. I am currently working towards a Masters and ultimately a PHD on Theology and urban culture. I have in the past organised community awareness experiences which have involved whole school participation, I have an enviable range of links into different spiritual communities and I have worked with a range of inspirational speakers and delegates who are engaging and relevant to the experiences of all young people.

Diversity: I have organised community awareness days for up to 2500 people, which I have built from scratch and I have also liaised with different communities and have also engaged in a race changing experiment. I routinely deliver inspirational assembles on difference and diversity and have an enviable access to artists from all different cultures who can assist in the celebration of culture and diversity in the UK today. I would bring all of this to your school.

Sport: I have contacts in the World of sport with Team Extreme, Urban Flow who are BMX riders and Parkour practitioners respectively but I also have contacts with John Farnworth, Flame, the only female UK parkour practitioner.  I also have contacts with Conman and numerous other underground sporting practitioner and I have worked on projects involving the making of skateboards and BMX restoration in the past as well as the acquisition and the management of a mobile skatepark and I also have links with the creative quarter and I know many talented providers of sporting experiences which again are unconventional but transformative. I have also worked with local dancers and performers and have access to range of street sport providers who fall outside of the traditional PE curriculum and include the Kent Frisbee team as well as BMX riders from outside of Kent some of whom were featured in the film 'Concrete Circus'.

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Business: I have a lot of links under the guise of information and guidance and I have worked with a lot of local businesses in the local area. Previously I co-ordinated the business and enterprise specialism at The Marsh Academy and I am fully conversant with the ideas related to social enterprise and civic philanthropy. I have worked on numerous projects in the past and I have always involved young people in a range of transformative and life changing experiences. I am currently running a clothing company called Kent Couture primarily as a hobby, however it has a local focus and is generating a lot of interest. Instagram @kentcouture Facebook @Kentcouturebrand

I have written a CPD package on the Middle Ability Student which has about 3000 users and I am attaching a PDF version of the package for you to look at with Pearson Professional. I have also recently been commissioned by George Pearson, to write another CPD package on Creativity and its importance in education today and this is of course related to the recent Amanda Speilman comments and speech from January 27th 2020  https://www.gov.uk/government/speeches/amanda-spielman-speaking-at-the-royal-opera-house and also linked to The Durham University report

https://www.dur.ac.uk/creativitycommission/report/.

 

I have also written a book chapter for Routledge on Creativity and Citizenship edited by Ralph Leighton and part of this chapter was about using food and cookery to celebrate the diverse and multi-cultural Society we live in linked to the Grenfell Tower's cookbook 'Together'. This prompted me to complete work with students in the kitchens to produce some of the key recipes from the book itself and by doing this the students learnt about cultural diversity within their own communities.

In addition to this I have attached an image of a set of skateboards I made with a cohort of student and as you will note one of these boards is Nepalese and the whole idea was to commission an international collection of boards for the Olympics (please find attached the images of the boards). The students enjoyed completing these and it was for a NCFE Business and Enterprise course. The students created the boards from scratch and it was painstaking work since it required a lot of self belief and resilience in the completion of the research brief. Academic outcomes were finely balanced with personal development outcomes, life skills as well as functional skills, group work and interpersonal skills and processes. Students completing the course achieved distinctions and the moderator commented at the time what an amazing piece of work this was since it balanced evenly academic enjoyment with a personal sense of achievement, The Cube in Folkestone (https://kingpinmag.com/features/articles/folkestones-multi-storey-skatepark.html) in the near future will be opening an indoor skateboarding venue and this could again provide another enrichment opportunity for students to make and to create boards and then to market them and to sell them in a local venue.

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