Over the past 6 weeks, we’ve hosted 12 work experience students from Paignton Academy, Torquay Academy, Spires College, KEVICC, Churston, and Teignmouth schools. It’s been a total delight working with a range of Year 10 and Year 12 students, and they’ve been so helpful and keen and capable. Work experience season is always a real highlight of the year for us – talking about entry routes into careers in the arts is a particularly important subject, and we also really value the experience we get in mentoring, teaching and supporting them across the time they’re with us. Big thanks to Barney, Gaby, Thomas, Jo, Alanah, Elsie, Jacob, Eva, Nieve, Ivy, Lilly and Spencer. Below are some photos of some of the fabulous 2024 crew, as well as some words from a few of them! 🙂
Work experience schedules can be varied – careers in the arts are rarely 9-5 gigs, so we do try to give a realistic sense of this during work experience week. We ask for weekend and evening commitments because this is part of the reality of the work. Learning to navigate public transport, how to rest in the middle of the day, and how to move between admin jobs to creative jobs to technical jobs is all part of the realistic life/work patterns of careers in the arts. This crew did so well and tackled the challenges with real enthusiasm and commitment!
From Lilly:
Hi, I’m Lilly. I am working here with Doorstep Arts for my work experience at Paignton Academy. I found Doorstep when they came to my school to do Devising Discovery which really helped with my drama GCSE.
From my experience working with Doorstep, I have learnt a lot about myself. I have found that working with themes has really helped me with my confidence and communication skills, as I have worked with a lot of groups! I really liked working and helping with Shrek and DYT.
The staff here at Doorstep are hilarious and really easy to get along with. Doorstep has really helped me boost my confidence. It has been really fun and fantastic working here with Doorstep, I will definitely try to join back in September!
From Jacob:
Hello! My name is Jacob Shapter and I was one of the students who had the pleasure of working alongside the Doorstep this week from making newsletters to crafting props and other items for Doorsteps upcoming show “Shrek” so here’s a more indepth look at my week so far.
Monday: A very manic and energetic start to the week the Doorstep team, and me and some other students started off the day by getting to know the team and what events we have later on in the week, then straight after that we went straight into crafting props and wet felting for our atmospheric props and then after a hearty lunch filled with Doritos and hummus and other great food wwe went straight back into our craft until it was time to get home.
Tuesday: A very calm and chilled out day in the office we went straight into our laptops and knuckled down into our website editing and newsletter crafting, however it wasn’t all office work we had to get ready to help out on the evenings Shrek rehearsals- a very accomplished day.
Wednesday: The work keeps on coming! We had a half and half such as helping to script a childs panto show which was wonderful to help out the playwright and it really opened my eyes to how much freedom Doorstep can give you to be creative, however we had to also get an impromptu tech basic training. It was a very good learning experience on getting to grips with lighting equipment for we had a show to tech for that night and we had to hurriedly set up the lighting equipment for the primary school show. It’s safe to say we smashed it, keeping ahead of schedule.
Thursday: Another day in the office planning huge projects to go across Europe and help young people get into the arts and performing industry across europe and finishing crafting stuff we didn’t finish on the monday a chiled way to finish off the day.
One of the highlights of our week with the KEVICC students was getting a chance to provide lighting for the Oldway Primary performing arts show – Olivia! This was a great learning opportunity for us to try out the new touring technical rig, and to help provide some professional stage lights for a local primary school. Huge thanks to the Riviera Education Trust arts lead, Louise Darvid, for her work – and congratulations to the students from Oldway who performed, they were fantastic!
We look forward to work experience season because it’s good fun and good learning, but also partly because it can also mark the start of a longer journey for some young people working and participating with us – for example, we’ve loved having Alanah and Elsie back at Saturday Drama, volunteering and assisting to the end of term. We’re also looking forward to welcoming some of this talented crew in Sept in some of our drama groups. This kind of extended commitment and longer term mentorship is exactly what we hope to have coming from work experience week.
