Monday 15 December 2008

BBC Children in Need bid

Hello Everybody.

I would like to invite discussion regarding our current bid to Children in Need that we are working on. The next deadline is 15 January, and it would be ideal if we could try and submit something before this, but if not, the next is 15 April. (There is a three month selection process between submission dates and the awarding of grants).

We would like to submit a further bid for the next financial year and for the next two following financial years of an 'interregional nature' - where in the first year of a project's running, the project starts in one region, as a 'model of good practice'. The merits of this project would then be used to establish it in a second region, so that the project consequently has two centres of operation. The following year, the project in the new location would then also become a 'model of good practice', and the merits of this would consequently be used to establish the project in a third location, and so on.

Today I spoke to our contact at the South West Office in Bristol, who remembered Drake Music - we were awarded a grant for 06-07 and 07-08 (for work in South West - I believe that they funded the south west prior to this too). Our contact advised me that although we were technically eligible for support, the committee are growing more stringent against awarding grants for work in schools, especially that which 'takes' pupils out of lessons.

Obviously it is more difficult to organise projects that fall outside of school hours and buildings.

As regional project managers, do you have any ideas about what we could do? Any thoughts and ideas regarding this would be extremely welcome! Do please use the blog to share them and help shape the bid.

For more information on the official guidelines and application systems, check http://www.bbc.co.uk/pudsey/grants/guidance.pdf
it is a lengthy document but is well indexed.

Thank you all.
Roseanna

3 comments:

drakemusic said...

Well, my first ever time blogging....

Anyway, a quick thought: would certain aspects of the Useless Eaters project be something we could develop for BBC CIN bid? Can we discuss? I don't know much about it yet, but is this something that could be developed over a period of 3 years? Alternatively there's the Concerto Project - which I would like to link to 2012 somehow. Sorry all a bit garbled perhaps. Overall, I would like to see something that connects our work with children and young people in the 4 regions, and that could have both a local and a national impact. Any thoughts?

Doug said...

Doug here.
My initial thoughts are:

CIN have been really supportive of SW work in the past (they funded us for 5 yrs in total). It would clearly be worth going back to them.

I think 15th Jan is too soon to put a well thought through bid together, unless anyone has any fully formed ideas? 15 April sounds more realistic to me.

The phased interregional model is a good idea and I think will appeal to CIN.

The 'taking pupils out of lessons' is not a problem. We will clearly need to pitch the project in a curriculum-focussed way, presenting music sessions as lessons rather than workshops. We could even use one component of this project to fund the roll-out of the NOCN music course and other Curriculum Development related outcomes throughout Drake Music and beyond?

My over-all feeling is that we could use this bid to fund the grass-roots work which needs to happen in a number of our interregional schools related projects. So:

Development of Concerto material
Dissemination of CD resources
Useless Eaters (probably more for older children)

Any more?

drakemusic said...

hi there

i m not sure useless eaters would be appropriate for school age due to the subject matter - gemma any thoughts?

another idea for this could be to look at the zion ensemble model again (multi-instrumental, genre, ability orchestra which creates new music together) and to support disabled members with a separate young disabled composers group? this could be at weekends.

any thoughts on this?