DJ SCHOOL UK ANNUAL REPORT 2017-2018
Contents
Schools and Education Page 2 - 3 Projects and Partners Page 3 - 4 Student Success Page 5 Performances Page 6 Press Page 7 Organisation Page 8 Data Collection and Evaluation Page 9 - 10 Finances Page 10 Summary Page 10 Schools/Education
This year we proudly provided the city-wide Springwell Academy for PRU delivery with weekly sessions for their students and nearly all those who attended achieved accreditations during their time with us. A staf member commented to us that “…this is the only thing these boys leave the unit for. Everyone else is out on Christmas trips for fnal week but these 4 wanted to stay with us.” Unfortunately, despite the positive comments and requests for further sessions received from Springwell Academy staf, this important engagement with some of the city’s hardest to engage young learners will not be able to continue next year due to funding cuts.
We delivered inspiring engagement at the Leeds Heads of Music conference and got a great response from 15 heads of department. Following this and our other previous work, we continued to deliver peripatetic sessions in Allerton Grange, Leeds West Academy and we are expanding this role into Pudsey Grangefeld and Guiseley High School.
We helped students in our after- school clubs from across the city and visited the Cooperative Academy, Brownhill Primary, Boston Spa, Queensway Primary and Hovingham Primary. We ran a year-long project with the Rodillian Academy which culminated in a fnal performance in July 2018. Schools/Education (Continued)
We supported three more students with their GCSE performance examinations and we wish them luck with their overall grades.
To support our CPD ofer and our AQA UAS accreditations, we developed free-to-use resource packs, including video tutorials, on our website so any teacher or community organisation staf can refresh their knowledge of basic DJing and deliver the accreditations themselves. We also heard from AQA themselves that, just one year after writing our AQA UAS accreditation, it is already the 12 th most popular award by student usage out of more than 10,000 awards.
Projects and Partners
We have continued to deliver the third and fnal year of our Youth Music funded progression route and we look forward to being able to report on the data analysis this time next year. We have submitted an application to follow up and expand this programme and eagerly await news on this.
We were lucky to be able to continue our Girls only Club plus develop several other innovative projects or resources via funds from our partners in the Leeds Music Education Partnership (LMEP).
Our Arts Council funded Project Pulse came to a climactic end with multiple performances detailed below.
We continued to develop our relationship on all levels with Leeds College of Music. We delivered our annual workshop on the history of Hip Hop and turntablism, and ran a short set of Saturday DJ sessions as part of their LCoM juniors SMS school. Meanwhile our MD Jim Reiss has also accepted a role as industry consultant on the LcoM forthcoming Projects and Partners (Continued) foundation degree in DJ skills. We hope Jim will be able to help ensure the foundation degree is robust and suitable for any students of DJ School UK to move onto.
We once again delivered a Princes Trust “Get Started” programme and this year the group showed a very high level of team-working.
For the adults with physical disabilities or learning difculties, we supported their parties at both Meanwood Fest and the Beautiful Octopus Club.
We also played host to or were happy to support and deliver at Denon DJ, Opera North, Skyline, Harrogate Prevent, Leeds Scratch Collective, and the Leeds City Museum. “The young people of Bilton Youth Club have been participating over the past few weeks in a fantastic opportunity to access DJ workshops, provided and funded by NYMAZ and NCOP Higher York. This has been a huge success by enabling them to engage in an activity that they may not have had access to otherwise.” (Youth worker at Bilton Youth Club)
After a warmly received exhibition event our Discover project, entitled “We all have a story to tell”, fnally concluded and we found the time to concentrate once more on our own locality by accessing various wards' Leeds City Council Youth Activities Fund. Our most successful of these by far was the second year of our Urban Arts Week at All Hallows Church in the Easter holidays. Student Successes
This year, these have included 3 students who were supported and assessed in their DJ skills for the performance element of GCSE music and 2 learners who used us for the skills elements of their Duke of Edinburgh's Award. We have had 216 accreditations awarded via the AQA Unit Award Scheme and we had confrmation of 35 Arts Award in July 2017. Some of the work for these will have been achieved in the previous year.
We have 10 music leaders, who have been educated entirely from scratch on our Youth Music Funded progression route, and who have now taken on self-confdent roles in the following positions or activities:
-Teaching administrator local school and self-employed music leader.
-Volunteer and Mentor in local music organisation.
-Full time employee in local music organisation.
-Planned, achieved funding and ran year-long girls only DJ club in partnership with our organisation.
-Joined external live music project and composed, rehearsed and performed with dancers and vocalists on three occasions.
-Joined external project using turntable skills to create new music with jazz band, orchestra and choir.
-Played live at various DJ school events and ran own School DJ Club.
-Set up as self-employed to deliver beat box mentoring and engaging the hard to reach.
We also know of and stay in touch with 5 others either in Further Education or setting up and running their own events. Performances
As DJ School UK has grown so has its reputation and this has led to us being ofered increasing opportunities for our young people to play live and gain valuable recognition and experience.
This year representatives of ours played at:
-The Leeds Triathlon,
-The Leeds Scratch Collective Super Scratch Sunday,
-Music for Youth National Festival,
-Project Pulse at Breeze on Tour,
-Project Pulse at Kirkgate Market,
-The "Get Lost" festival at the West Yorkshire Playhouse.
-Allerton Grange school end of term show.
- DJ School UK shows in Dec 2017, including the Project Pulse fnale and end of term showcase linked here and here
-and fnally in March 2018 at the end of our week-long Urban Arts Project. Press/Social Media -“We all have a story to tell” video from Orangebox: https://vimeo.com/204166687
-Voice mag interview with MD Jim Reiss: https://www.voicemag.uk/interview/interview- with-jim-reiss
-Hip Hop History month photos: https://www.facebook.com/hiphophistorymonthuk/photos/a.380146445732687.1073 741831.215430305537636/380152952398703/?type=3&theater
rd -#ThanksToYou end of year video by Callum 23 Nov: https://www.facebook.com/DJSchoolUK/videos/1461296543967208/? hc_ref=ARSkMH3eTSBUlh8Y0a7PtGII9- xOIQC1xXsYlYuK2dBhT1L2vX9UC1_mlo1EMTBe1is
-AQA using our quotes and images to promote UAS we developed with them in online webinar Feb 2018.
-Megan bio for girls that gig: http://girlsthatgig.com/on-the-dec ks-coxon/
-Grooveschool share of Mixmag piece: https://www.facebook.com/groups/Grooveschooluk/permalink/1785886551474969
-Review of SMS project May-June 2018 https://www.lcm.ac.uk/courses/junior- lcom/junior-lcom-news/dj-school-uk-project/ Organisation
Finally and after several dead-ends and wasted adventures, we secured and moved our entire operation in to a new, larger venue. It has been recognised by Google and can be viewed online by links here as a google business or here on our website. This will allow us much more scope for growth. One area in which we aim to grow is sustainability. To this end we have taken on a subcontracted sales-person to sell and arrange private one to one tuition in order to raise funds for our core non-proft work. The private work will all take place in a separate space to our main club/workshop room and will not confict or compete with our core aims. We hope it will reduce our dependency on funding applications and help us train more tutors in more methods of delivery.
As part of moving venue we are now fully trained in and are solely responsible for frst aid at work and fre safety. We have ftted CCTV for the purposes of safeguarding and child protection. PRS have accepted our work under their music therapy status and thus aforded us the right to use music at no charge to them.
We have also, of course, had to become GDPR compliant while simultaneously renewing all our clients’ emergency contacts and consents.
We have continued to expand our team of subcontracted tutors and now have 5 highly skilled and reliable people who understand our ethos and aims.
We have also continued to expand our network and have been talking to Future DJs, Want 2 DJ, Grooveschool and others about how we can share our skills and resources to develop best practice. As usual, we have invested all our spare funds in new equipment and now have a set of what are considered to be the industry standard media players (Pioneer XDJ1000s).
Finally, as we move into the next accounting period we are undertaking talks with Music Leeds, Musical Futures, We Are IVE and Leeds City Council, all of whom separately have expressed an interest in partnership work or otherwise supporting us. Considering that some of these are nationwide or even global concerns, we are very excited about this attention. Data collection and evaluation
As is the case when working with young people our data collection systems cannot quantify every attendee or benefciary at our sessions. At open days and drop-in sessions we cannot always ask all young people to leave their age or ethnic group, in sessions in our studio sometimes we can only gain a head count as support staf cannot divulge more information relating to looked after children or children with high needs. Also sometimes there are occasional children who manage to skip out after DJing and before we have had them complete a feedback form.
DJ School UK Data collected from 1st For the year For the year For the year June to 31st May 2015-2016 2016 - 2017 2017 - 2018 Total number of visits. 1850 2012 1872 Total number of individual young people who have beneftted from our 1216 1026 707 services. Percentage of female attendees in 9.00% 16.00% 26.00% studio sessions. Percentage of young people in studio sessions who are facing challenging N/A 29.00% 49.00% circumstances. Percentage of young people in studio sessions who have an ethnicity other 18.00% 37.00% 36.00% than “White British.”
From the above stats it can be seen that we have continued to deliver to less individuals overall yet the number of visits is remaining high. This is because we are now able to use our reputation to target viable groups of young people much more efectively. As confrmation of this, although we accessed 707 individuals, 152 of those visited the studio and 63% of those became what are considered “core” visitors (attending more than 3 times). Furthermore, a fantastic 30% of these became “super core” visitors (attending more than 10 times and completing at least one programme of work with us). These conversion rates were not even monitored in our frst few Data collection and evaluation (Continued) years but we are very pleased to state that now we are more targeted, conversion and retention rates are becoming as efcient as expected. Our proportion of attendees facing challenging circumstances continues to grow, as does the proportion of females, while our proportion of attendees from non-white British backgrounds appears to have levelled out.
Finances: st st In the accounting period from 1 June 2016 to 31 May 2017 our turnover was £76815.19 with a proft before tax of £8817.36 and a total of capital and retained st reserves of £10718. This accounting period (to 31 May 2018) our turnover is forecasted to be: £93,000 with proft before tax of £203 but reserves of £10110 which when taking into account over £3000 worth of depreciation shows we are maintaining our resources and thus able to continue to deliver our quality services into the future.
Summary:
Five years ago we only hoped we could be at this point of success with such a solid space, excellent array of equipment and reliable team. Our partners, delivery, results and especially students’ successes all leave us proud. If there are any issues we face in the near future, they are only relating to our individual comforts as we are possibly in slight danger of getting a little too big for ourselves. We are reaching a size at which our management team are fnding themselves pulled away from the core work of teaching and supporting young people. It is hoped that conversations with external larger organisations will help us plan how to move forward in a manner which means our original tutors and founders can delegate the back ofce and admin work and concentrate once more on creative direction and direct tutoring. Whatever happens in that respect, we know our dedicated team and city-wide reputation should mean we have a bright future.