This is Trinity - August's focus: Equality, Diversity and Inclusion

Trinity College London is committed to providing accessibility without barriers to our qualifications. We have evolved and grown over the last 150 years, and so too has our commitment to ensuring that arts education is accessible to those from diverse backgrounds and varying circumstances. We work hard to embed equality, diversity and inclusion in our qualifications design and exam options. On a practical level we also provide funding support to groups who face barriers to accessing arts education.

This month’s theme for This is Trinity focuses on Equality, Diversity and Inclusion and we have brought together resources that help demonstrate how we can support you with making opportunities for recognition available to as many people as possible.

Highlights for this month include:

Music – Awards and Certificates in Musical Development

The Awards and Certificates in Musical Development are Trinity’s new, fully inclusive qualifications for schools and other settings delivering the Sounds of Intent music learning programme, and are designed for those with learning difficulties, across the whole spectrum of abilities and needs.

Open to all learners with specific needs, from those with profound learning difficulties to others with advanced musicianship skills, these new qualifications enable everyone to have their musical achievements and progress formally recognised.

Music – Women composers in Trinity’s music syllabuses

We continue to work hard to create a broad and diverse choice of repertoire for our candidates to choose from. As an exam board we were the first to include repertoire from women and more ethnically diverse composers. We’ve published a blog this month which highlights some of the historical and modern women composers we feature across our music syllabuses – shining a spotlight on those who were often overshadowed by the male contemporaries of their time.

Music & Drama – Access Fund: Unlocking doors and supporting aspirations

Cathy Corbett, a piano teacher from Belfast shares some of the stories from her students who have benefitted from Trinity’s direct funding to remove barriers to accessing music education and shows how they have progressed as a result.

Arts Award – Using Arts Award to help vision impaired people

Alex Rees, Creative Learning Lead at UCAN Productions, a performance and creative arts co-operative for blind and partially sighted children and young people, talks about how Arts Award has enabled their young members to truly unlock their creative potential.

We hope you find this month’s resources useful in identifying ways we can directly support your own equality, diversity, and inclusion goals in arts education, and are perhaps inspired to working towards removing any barriers to accessibility that you can influence.