Bettering the Creative Industries of Tomorrow
it’s great to be here it’s very unusual
setting for me i’m used to playing in
big venues like this in front of lots of
people but obviously the environment’s
fairly different i’m usually playing
very loud pretty uh hardcore music
to a pretty raucous crowd so if anyone
does just want to sort of start throwing
some chairs around or start a mosh pit
it would make me feel much more at home
and obviously
don’t really do that be completely
inappropriate probably quite dangerous
um
i uh i want to talk today a little bit
about
my journey to becoming a recording
artist
and an experience i had during that
journey that led me
into the world of education and to
become involved with a project that i’m
very passionate about
and i hope you’ll find it interesting
when i left
school i headed up to manchester to
start a degree
and i was set to study history of art
for three years
um but i knew pretty much from day one
the minute i stepped off that train i
was never gonna finish
that course and the reason for that was
because i had become
completely obsessed with everything to
do with music
up in manchester i met my
uh now business partner the chase of
chase and status
his name’s saul not chase i call him
soho and we we hit it off immediately
because
just like me saw was not interested
really in his degree
but he was obsessed with music and
everything about it
and it wasn’t long before predictably we
we bombed out of university in our first
year we failed miserably
and we had some very difficult phone
calls to individually make to our mums
who had
single-handedly slaved away for the last
20 years
to give us a very privileged very
expensive education
to get us to university in the first
place so it’s a difficult phone call to
make and i i remember where i was
vividly i
was up in student halls probably fairly
pale complexion
and uh i called up my mom and i said
yeah hey mom
i got some bad news
he’s not really going to work out for me
i’ve taken the decision to drop out but
don’t worry
i’ve got a plan and i proceeded to tell
her about
my plan to become a dj now
didn’t go down that well my mom didn’t
say much he did make a noise
that i’ll never forget it was a kind of
mix of a crying and a scream and a howl
if you can imagine that just all in one
um and i knew obviously she was
concerned well
me and saw we we stayed in manchester we
loved the city and
we just we got sort of jobs wherever we
could to make ends meet like any
struggling musician would
and in our spare time we tried to access
and get into the music industry this
industry we were
fascinated and loved and we would do
anything to do that we would
promote nights we’d hang out record
shops hang out around djs and clubs do
whatever it took
and and bit by bit we made some progress
up there and we made some music that
some people thought was
good and we had some small releases and
and we we started to climb up the ladder
of the music industry
this was what we looked like back then
you can see we took things very
seriously it was
hard man poses on um
around the same time i managed to land a
really great job
teaching in a in a large sixth form
college
in the in the heart of manchester uh and
i’ll go on to spend two years teaching
um 16 17 year olds music production
music technology
to young people from some of the
toughest backgrounds from some of the
toughest parts of the city
they came from very different
backgrounds to that of my own
and these two years were very inspiring
for me i
i was blown away by the talent that i
saw uh day in day out these young
people um and i got very excited about
their prospects
i was thinking wow these if these guys
are 16 already doing this level of work
and here’s me sort of 23 by now having
success
what’s going to happen to these young
people and i became very excited
at their prospects so
i did this for two years and then me and
saw we left we left manchester we moved
back to london to
pursue our own dreams and really try and
go for it
and by now we started to to our dreams
became a reality
we started to play shows like this and
we got paid to travel the world
and do what we loved doing and work with
amazing people
and i stayed in touch with most of my
students i was very eager to see
where were their journeys taking them
and the more i spoke with them the more
more disheartened i got because none of
them were realizing their potential
the same way i was and this really
bothered me
i’d seen how great these kids were and i
was doing well why weren’t they doing
well too
and it’s a it’s a it’s a complicated
question with probably a very
complicated answer but to try and answer
it
i thought back at my time with these
kids
at school from 16 to 19 critical time
for them
in in their lives and i thought about
the school that i taught at
and it was a great school great teachers
we were very passionate and cared
greatly for for the students there
but like all media courses and all art
courses and
music courses in state schools they’re
poorly
funded and they’re poorly resourced
which means
the computers were always breaking there
weren’t enough musical instruments the
studios weren’t fit for purpose
there was also very little development
of the personal skills these young
people would actually need when they
left school to get into
an industry like the music industry the
syllabus was a bit redundant
it didn’t feel like it kept up with the
changing nature of the music industry
projects felt dated um and there weren’t
really any
partnerships with any musical
organizations in manchester there’s
tons of great companies organizations in
manchester
and the school didn’t really have any
proper solid partnerships
so i spoke to my brother about this
um my brother was working in education
at the time for a great company called
teach first
and i said look i wanna i want to do
something to address this this has
really bothered me
um and we started hashing out ideas
uh how we could address this issue
around specifically around wasted talent
um and young people not coming from the
best backgrounds having the best starts
in life
why is their talent sometimes wasted so
we started hashing our ideas on the
literally the back of a napkin small
projects that we could do
that might change things and we spoke to
anyone that would listen to us sort of
drone on about this
these ideas and we got some great
feedback people seem really positive in
what we were talking about
and they gave us some more feedback and
and some more support and more ideas and
suddenly that napkin became
uh an a4 piece of paper and
we spoke to some more people suddenly
we’re speaking to leading teachers we’re
speaking to
executives from youtube from spotify
from universal we’re speaking to
mps we’re speaking to recording artists
all of them
saying the same thing giving us massive
confidence
that we would on to something they all
agreed with us that
the best people need to be able to
access the music industry
or the creative industries regardless of
their background
and this momentum over the course of 18
months
transformed uh the back of a napkin into
a 200 page application
to the department for education to open
a free school
in the heart of east london in 2014
east london arts and music was born
this is me and my brother this is a
breaking ground photo where
we’ve been procured a plot of land by
the government bought us plots of land
in east london
to build a school and a year and a half
later this this building was built
um elam
is a 16 to 19
state funded free school it’s free to
attend like any other state school
it specializes in music and everything
to do with music specializing games
design
and specializes in film and television
so a big facet of the creative
industries
when i talk about the creative
industries i’m talking about the
thousands of jobs that sit behind the
people you see on screens the people you
hear on the radio
the thousands of people involved with
the creative industries so people at
record labels producers technicians
live event managers um illustrators
the thousands and thousands of jobs
involved then elam
serves that those creative industries
it’s
it elam lives in tao hamlets the borough
of tower hamlets
which has the highest rate one of the
highest rates of child poverty
in the country which is significant for
us it’s also a very diverse borough
which is important
and it has a very rich musical and
artistic heritage
if you come to elam as a young person
you are learning
what it takes to get into the creative
industries you are learning
about the type of person you need to be
to thrive there
you’re learning about relevant skills
you will need to use there
what you’re not doing is you’re not just
there
to get a piece of paper or qualification
you are getting qualifications you’re
getting the highest ones you can get
eight land but you’re not just there for
that
i’ve seen it in in in practice the
creative industries they don’t actually
care too much about those qualifications
unlike law or medicine they don’t really
care
so much about those um
now the problem is the way schools are
set up
they find it hard to provide all of that
training to a young person
they shouldn’t be expected to elam can’t
do that on its own
they haven’t got the capacity they don’t
have the know-how schools are too busy
trying to deliver the curriculum and get
young people through those important
qualifications
they are trying to provide care for the
hundreds if not thousands of young
people that come through their doors
this is really difficult in itself
they’re doing this usually all state
schools are doing this on a very
tight budget so schools like elan
creative schools they need
industry experts they need partners
they need professionals to come in and
shape that experience for the young
person there
and that could be anything that could be
advising on how a building looks it
could be how a classroom interacts it
could be
how courses are designed and assessed
and delivered it could be
um the type of language used by people
in that in that building
this is one of our partners universal
music they do
a lot of this shaping they affect
a lot of the experience of young people
in many different ways and the effects
are profound for our young people
this is the interesting bit for me this
is the really exciting bit the
interaction
between the private sector the world of
work in this case
the creative industries and the world of
education in this case schools like elam
if you get it right amazing things
happen
everyone wins the work done in the
school
becomes massively relevant the outcomes
for trainees becomes tangible coursework
can even become
commercial and engagement from
everyone goes through the roof this is a
small example
uh one of many at the school this was in
our second year some trainees of ours
made a song
part of a songwriting unit they made a
great song and they used one of our
partners to set up a record label
and they figured out a marketing
strategy and a distribution strategy and
they figured out how to pitch to radio
just like a top record label would
because of this
the song got picked up by radio one uh
mr jam is a famous dj he started playing
it a lot
they got streamed on spotify and youtube
hundreds of thousands of times
now this piece of school work the
outcome for that piece of schoolwork
was that the trainees that made it they
got paid they got paid money for a piece
of work they’re doing at school
our partners got paid money of course
they got a distinction for the work i
don’t think they even knew by the end of
it they were doing
just some coursework for a qualification
that’s the exciting bit for me
that’s the market that should be the
measure
it should be the benchmark that we
aspired to what would what would the
best in the business
say about some coursework what would the
best in the business
say about this young person this trainee
if a young person leaves somewhere like
elam and they don’t want to go to
university
are they industry ready will they thrive
in the industry and if not why not
it’s it’s really complex actually doing
this
interacting partnering schools with the
private sector
getting companies to work alongside
schools in this in this way
at this level it’s really difficult to
do that because um
there’s massive safeguarding issues
companies are really nervous of working
with schools
which are full of young people under 18
that’s understandable there aren’t very
good systems and processes in place
to to help that transaction run smoothly
um at elan we do that by being
innovative the way we think about those
partnerships we do it by being really
flexible
we do it by being open-minded we do it
by being grateful for opportunities we
get and by always showing
that the opportunities our partners give
us are mutually beneficial
as our outcomes for our trainees gets
better
so do the outcomes for our partners
i’m proud to say elam’s doing doing well
it
received an outstanding rating in its
first ofsted
inspection we’ve helped uh we’ve
inspired and helped open
another school called the london screen
academy which is a fantastic film school
with some of the biggest backers from
the film industry and i hope that by
showing
um the benefit of the creative industry
coming together with creative schools
we can better the creative industries of
tomorrow
and most importantly the lives of many
young people thank you very much
you