The Prince’s Foundation for Children & the Arts is an educational charity committed to helping children experience the arts in a high quality and sustained way. The main funding programme run by the Foundation is called Start, which supports cultural organisations to develop and deliver arts enrichment programmes for primary and secondary school students, particularly who have not accessed the arts or culture before.

Start provides funding and support to cultural venues (e.g. theatres, museums, galleries and orchestras) to enable them to build partnerships with selected primary and secondary schools in their local area. A Start partnership project generally lasts for two to three years but the relationship between schools and their partner cultural venue typically continues and strengthens.

Throughout an academic year, children will make at least two visits to their partner venue. In addition they benefit from backstage tours and special workshops, and get to meet performers as well as people behind the scenes. The result is that children experience a rich engagement with the arts, begin to feel comfortable in cultural spaces and become increasingly confident and creative in their own right. The children who take part are drawn from schools in areas of rural and economic deprivation and come from a wide variety of backgrounds. Some have been excluded from school while others have behavioural and learning difficulties.

We look to work with people who can deliver projects that are:
- high quality
- target children who are unlikely to have visited arts venues before
- accessible for the audience targeted
- offer opportunities for creative learning and skills development
- can be sustained over a period of time
- build upon your organisation’s current education programme

The next Start application round for projects taking place in the 2010/2011 academic year will open in December 2009.

For full details and an application form visit - www.childrenandarts.org.uk/