What is ELAM ?
ELAM is a world-class 16-19 Academy which opened in September 2014 in Bromley-by-Bow (Tower Hamlets). ELAM partners with leading creative industry professionals and organisations in the UK and internationally to ensure their diverse, inclusive and creatively excellent Trainees get the access, opportunity and inspiration they deserve. In any year there are 300 Trainees aged 16-19 taking courses in Music Performance, Music Production, Games Design or Film and Television. They come from every London borough; they have different passions and different experiences but they are united through their talent and pursuit of creative excellence.
What do we believe ? (Vision)
We believe all children growing up in the UK should see themselves reflected in UK culture.
How will we achieve our vision ? (Mission)
ELAM will identify, hone, support and connect a pipeline of representative talent from early education to employment within the creative industries.
What are our strategic objectives?
We have three strategic objectives.
Attract the right talent
Nurture this talent while at ELAM
Support/connect/build paths for Alumni to create impact
Why are these our objectives?
Our vision is that all children growing up in the UK see themselves represented in UK culture. We believe this vision will better the creative industries of tomorrow and believe this can be achieved by increasing the access routes into those industries for talented young people. The creative industries in the UK continue to do well and are currently worth £92 billion to the economy, while growing at more than double the speed of the wider economy. However, unlike many other industries, it is not always clear how to get into these jobs and therefore there is often a lack of diversity within these sectors. Increasing the access routes to everyone will therefore increase the quality of talent and the continued growth of the sector long term.
ELAM opened in September 2014 with an inaugural cohort of 75 music trainees- our music programme designed to provide young talent with the musical, technical and personal development needed for ‘industry readiness’. Our Film & Television Production and Games Design and Development courses were launched in 2017, resulting in our trainee numbers reaching a capacity of 300.
ELAM is fully funded by the Department for Education and inspected by OFSTED. Our first full Ofsted inspection in May 2017 resulted in a grading of Outstanding in every category. While this is a huge achievement, and something that we are immensely proud of, we are also still a long way from meeting our vision. There is still a lot of work to do and as a school we are restless in the pursuit of achieving this.
We provide industry standard courses for our trainees in Music, Games Design and Film & Television. We have partnered with sector leading organisations such as:
YouTube
Universal Music
The BPI
Modern Mirror
Creative Assembly
Pretty Bird
Ridley Scott Creative Group
Grain Media
Creative Assembly
Maddison Square Gardens
With our partners we have devised a curriculum that will develop the future leaders of these sectors by meeting the relevant knowledge, skills and cultural demands. We provide world-class facilities (including industry standard camera equipment, recording studios, games design software and PCs, a 400 seat fully-equipped multi-use performance space). In addition, trainees at ELAM undertake a study of Maths or English to supplement their specialism. We insist on this as, with our industry partners, we have identified the skills provided by these subjects (such as written and oral communication, problem solving, data analysis and research) are the key traits of the current leaders of these fields. We aim for our trainees to be ‘industry ready’ so we give them a curriculum experience that delivers this.
To be industry ready is to have all of the technical and personal qualities that allow young adults to progress into the workplace, or onto university and we constantly strive to develop this in all of our trainees.
What’s the problem we are trying to solve?
In Britain today, children from low-income and under-represented backgrounds are significantly less likely to achieve highly at school, progress to university or take up fulfilling employment. We aim to turn this problem on its head and provide a pipeline of talented, professional, ‘industry ready’ trainees from diverse and often under-represented backgrounds and allow them to experience success and show their value to the creative industries.
For the many creatively gifted young people within this group, opportunities to pursue a creative talent have become highly restricted. In general, creative education fails to develop meaningful opportunities within the sector for talent from low-income backgrounds - a sector in which networks, facilities, and additional expertise contribute so heavily to entry. This has been clearly and compellingly researched and articulated in the 2021 ‘Creative Majority’ report by the All Party Group for Creative Diversity.
It has been shown however that when real collaboration occurs between professionals from within both the creative and education sectors, opportunities can exist for young people of all backgrounds to realise musical potential and successfully pursue careers within the creative industries.
What does the end product look like?
Our YouTube shows the range of talent that our trainees have and develop - see ELAM’s vision in action here.
See our ‘Unseen, Unheard, Unplayed’ showcase featuring the final projects of our Year 13s from 2021 here.
Underpinning the development of our trainees, and the practice of our staff are ELAM’s Values of Inquisitiveness, Resilience, Reflectiveness, Dependability, Independence and Collaboration. These values align ELAM with our partner industries and are embedded at every level of the school as a signpost of the behaviours and characteristics that we strive for.
“ELAM provides an amazing opportunity for young, talented people to realise their full potential the same way I did. ”
Trainee Values
ELAM trainees focus on the skills and qualities used by industry leaders. We build and design all projects to ensure trainees are developing and assessed against the six core values at ELAM which frame everything we do. We look for trainees to work with Inquisitiveness, Resilience, Reflectiveness, Dependability, Independence and Collaboration. Alongside trainees' qualifications and industry partnerships these values will be critical for their long term success.
Our admissions process assess each prospective trainee against each of our six values, we do this without referring to any prior academic attainment.
We build the values in to all aspects of ELAM from governance through to trainees meaning we are committed to building a values based environment.