Blog

For anyone who visited our Forest School before the fire earlier this year, these sculptures may look familiar! Royal School Manchester's artist in residence, Lauren, worked with our school students to make dragonflies out of willow rods. These willow sculptures use traditional basket-weaving techniques to make pieces of art that can be handled directly by the students, encouraging them to touch, bend and smell the willow as well as seeing it hanging from the trees, as if in flight!

Multi-sensory art has long since been an important element of our curriculum. For some of our students with visual impairments, making sure that art can be enjoyed through other senses like touch or sound unlocks their creativity - adding materials to create different textured paints has helped our visually impaired students create their own paintings, for example, and varying materials like wool, ribbon, sticks and tin foil has created many striking pieces of tactile art.

When it comes to creative arts, Royal College Manchester students have exceeded all expectations. One former student left the college to work as an artist in residence on the strength of his own sculptures, and 5 students succeeded in gaining their Arts Award - a qualification equivalent to a Grade D GCSE!

Following in their footsteps, the school is working towards registering for the Artsmark award, recognising the school's work around creative arts and helping them further develop the range of cultural activities Royal School Manchester can offer.