An innovative local arts project has celebrated reaching its half-way stage this week and supporting nearly 1,000 local children to get creative.

Speight of the Art, the Mark Speight Foundation charity, teamed up with Heartlands Hospital in an exciting venture to provide artistic and creative workshops on the children’s ward and in the Hospital’s local schools.

Since its launch, the ground-breaking 32 week project has enriched the lives of 770 local school children, 115 young patients and has been entered for a national health award competition.

This innovative project, which will continue until the end of the summer, is supported using public funding by the National Lottery through Arts Council England, as well as by an award from the William Adlington Cadbury Charitable Trust.  It has been developed to bring together local school children and children in hospital to take part in workshops led by professional artists.

The sessions on Tuesdays and Thursdays of each week during term time look in turn at different aspects of well-being: food, exercise, lifestyle and spiritual.  The workshops reduce the mystery, and possibly fear of, the process of hospitalisation for the children who have not experienced it; and boost the knowledge of all the children participating in the programme of the role that food, exercise, lifestyle and the spiritual can play in well-being. 

The mother of one patient explained what the project meant to her: “This is really good, it’s soul destroying being in hospital. There are lots of Nintendo DSs and TVs, but this is great interaction with artists and the school children that come in.  It’s a brilliant way to pass the time in hospital and especially good that I can spend time with my son doing something that we would never have thought of doing at home. I would like to thank all involved in providing these workshops so much.”

Their teachers have been equally impressed.  Anne Shakespeare, a teacher at St Thomas More RC Primary School, Sheldon said. “The children really enjoyed the whole day and have been buzzing all day today about it. All the activities were set at a level that they could all cope with so no-one got left out and all produced wonderful work – this is very important too.”