The College’s Music and Sound Production department was chosen to work exclusively in partnership with CCSkills in Scotland and BBC Music Introducing to help college students obtain meaningful work experience in the creative industries.

It has been a year of tremendous challenge for everyone, which makes it all the more important to celebrate the great work our Creative & Cultural Skills team has delivered alongside our partners, employers, and people working throughout our sector.

The pilot Discover! Creative Careers Scotland programme kicked off with a week of online activities that saw creative and cultural sector employers from across the country sharing insight into the job roles that exist across their workforce.

We're delighted to be working with organisations across Scotland to build a skilled, inclusive, and fair creative and cultural sector, through a new programme supported by Creative Scotland.

Discover! Creative Careers, an award-winning, industry-led initiative that aims to inspire and inform young people about the job roles and pathways into the creative and cultural industries launches in Scotland.

A new toolkit aimed at widening access to the creative industries for people from working class backgrounds has been launched by the Social Mobility Commission.

Thanks to funding from the National Lottery, the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) is supporting a range of sessions and workshops for creative and cultural businesses throughout Northern Ireland, that will offer free expert advice and help a wider range of talent into the creative workforce.

Meet Tajpal Rathore: Artistic Director & Executive Producer at Tribe Arts and an actor, writer, producer, presenter and dramaturg who previously worked in TV and film for ten years.

Now in its fourth year, the Cultural Ambition programme is funded by the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the Welsh Government’s Museums, Archives and Libraries division. Since 2018, it has provided over 30 young people from Wales with skills and work experience across the Welsh cultural heritage sector through paid training.

The ‘flexi-job’ apprenticeships announced this week in England can offer a new route to careers in our world-leading creative industries and help arts and cultural organisations of all sizes connect with new talent. The scheme could also remove some barriers faced by those currently under-represented in the sector, boosting diversity and broadening opportunity.

Creative & Cultural Skills is thrilled to announce the approval of updates to Creative & Cultural Modern Apprenticeship Frameworks in Scotland.

The Secretary of State for Education, Gavin Williamson, has announced substantial cuts in funding for arts degrees. Our CEO, Jane Ide assesses the impact it might have on training for the sector.

Here at CCSkills we are proud to have facilitated the development of a brand new, level 3 museum and gallery technician apprenticeship. This apprenticeship will create a vocational pathway into this occupation, which people typically progress into via informal routes.

The recent report by Inc Arts UK A Year of Anti-Racist Action, which explores the progression made in the arts and culture sector, makes a valuable contribution to this discussion, and its findings echo many of the challenges we’ve encountered in the sector.

Creative & Cultural Skills is supporting the Young Person’s Guarantee as part of our commitment that the creative and cultural sector will Build Back Fairer. The Guarantee aims to provide an opportunity to every 16-24-year-old in Scotland through a job, an apprenticeship, further or higher education, training programme or volunteering. Sandy Begbie CBE CEO of Scottish Financial Enterprise, has led on its development and offers more detail about why it matters and how to get involved.

Creative & Cultural Skills supports industry-led live briefs that give students a unique opportunity to gain practical experience in the creative sector and to put their skills to the test. They are part of our work to create fair and inclusive opportunities for young people within the creative and cultural sectors.

Cardiff and Vale College and New College Swindon students gain real-world experience of designing theatre sets for a major opera company.

Led by the creative industries and delivered alongside our partners in England and Wales, the Discover! Creative Careers Week / Darganfod! Wythnos Gyrfaoedd Creadigol and Creative Careers Programme Cymru / Rhaglen Gyrfaoedd Creadigol Cymru (CCP Cymru) has reached over 120,000 young people in the last twelve months, despite Covid-19 restrictions.

The Creative Careers programme, including Discover! Creative Careers week, was born out of a desire to bust some pretty damaging myths about careers in the creative industries – notably the idea that creative careers are somehow ‘lesser’ jobs, that they are not well paid or that they are only appropriate for certain groups of people.

Creative & Cultural Skills is delighted that the 2021 Spring Budget announced on 3rd March revealed several measures that will support more young people from under-represented and disadvantaged communities into apprenticeships.

Even in the most challenging of times, the creative industries has put itself at the heart of helping the next generation learn about the myriad skills that are needed to help the sector operate. We need them to help us rebuild our sector post-Covid, making us stronger, fairer and even more impactful than before.

Lifelong learning, more technical training provision and industry-involved professional development for FE teaching staff. It sounds good but, asks Sara Whybrew, is it too good to be true?

Creative & Cultural Skills has been involved in apprenticeships since 2008, when we first supported the development of the creative apprenticeship frameworks for the industry. Since then we’ve seen thousands of apprentices start in the sector, supporting young people to pursue an alternative route into employment in our world leading industry.

Creative & Cultural Skills confirmed as a gateway organisation for Creative Kickstart: a UK-wide job creation scheme to transform the lives of hundreds of young people and create paid employment within our sector.

14-18 NOW Make Art Not War was a Creative Skills Programme commissioned as a legacy programme by 14-18 NOW (the UK's arts programme for the First World War centenary) and managed by Creative & Cultural Skills.

The immediate answer is unmistakeable: 2020 has been a tragedy. The profound loss of life, the cost to our economy, the detrimental impact on the wellbeing of millions. The impact has been palpable.

Celebrating the launch of Digital Discover! Creative Careers Week 2020, part of Creative Careers Programme Cymru. A programme of content that will support a diverse range of young people to learn about real jobs from those that do them, led by the creative industries.

Creative & Cultural Skills launches a programme of activity across Wales to ensure more diverse talent can aspire to careers in the creative industries.

Jane is based in Derbyshire and joins us from NAVCA, the national membership body for voluntary and community sector support and development organisations. She is an established CEO with experience of working collaboratively in complex environments and an extensive background in communications, stakeholder engagement at ministerial, national and regional levels and reputational management.

Those aged 16-24, claiming Universal Credit and at risk of long-term unemployment, will be eligible. Funding available for each six-month job placement will cover 100% of the National Minimum Wage for 25 hours a week – and employers will be able to top this wage up. It is intended to create hundreds of thousands of new, fully subsidised jobs for young people.

On 5 July, the UK Government announced emergency grants and loans to protect museums, galleries, theatres, independent cinemas, heritage sites and music venues.

Donald takes over from Carol Harvey-Barnes who has been acting Chair since the departure of Paul Latham in autumn 2018.