National Youth Arts Wales boosts its commitment to supporting Deaf and disabled young performers.

The National Youth Arts Wales (NYAW) staff team kicked off 2024 with a renewed approach to supporting Deaf and disabled young performers throughout Wales. Over four days, the whole staff team worked with inclusive arts specialists Taking Flight to develop their ability to support, connect and engage with Deaf and disabled young people. The training aimed to enable those across the organisation to provide a much higher level of bespoke support to each individual young performer, and ensure that NYAW’s ensembles and projects can be welcoming to all young people.

The series of innovative and interactive workshops enabled staff members to increase their understanding of inclusivity and access through hands-on training, supported by a fantastic team of Taking Flight facilitators with lived experience of disability. Specialisms such as blind awareness, Deaf awareness and sector-specific equality training were covered in detail, leading to thought-provoking discussions as a starting point for ongoing and embedded change.

Following the training, Evan Dawson, Chief Executive of NYAW said: “At National Youth Arts Wales, we know that creativity and cultural participation are vital ingredients of a healthy, happy and connected life. Every young person in Wales should have the opportunity to explore their own artistic potential. Talent does not discriminate - so this opportunity to work in-depth with Taking Flight has helped us understand the main barriers for young Deaf and disabled people to engage with us. We will continue to do everything we can to make National Youth Arts Wales a welcoming, supportive and truly creative community for everyone. It’s really exciting.”

With 17% of NYAW ensemble members identifying as Deaf or disabled in 2023, staff members are looking forward to applying this training directly to their work across ensembles, projects and beyond. This includes projects such as the “Assemble” partnership programme with National Youth Theatre GB, which is designed to support Deaf and disabled young people through long-term interventions in non-mainstream schools.

Hope Dowsett, Participation and Learning Producer at NYAW said: “We’d like to say a huge thank you to Taking Flight for running such a thought-provoking, insightful and interesting series of training sessions with us. Every staff member involved benefitted and improved their knowledge of working with disabled people, and we are now starting to apply this knowledge directly to our work. This will enable us to provide an even better experience to the amazing young people we work with each year.”

Steph Bailey-Scott, Participation, Access and Inclusion Officer at Taking Flight said: “It was an absolute pleasure to run our training sessions with the NYAW team, their passion for all things access and inclusion was so wonderful to see. I think this team are going to go very far, and I'm so excited for all the Deaf/ disabled and neurodivergent young people who will be involved in all their upcoming projects.”

NYAW will continue to review and renew its training provision in this area, as part of our ongoing commitment to bring more artistic opportunities to more young people across Wales from the widest range of backgrounds.

If you or your organisation could benefit from receiving disability awareness training from Taking Flight, please contact steph@takingflighttheatre.co.uk.