ELAM Is London's Coolest School

I visit East London Arts and Music (ELAM), a free academy for 16 to 19-year-olds offering music, film and games courses, on an early mid-May morning. The breakout area and the canteen, which would usually be buzzing with students collaborating, are mostly silent. Instead, sound pours into the empty hallways from the theatre where music trainees are rehearsing. Look into a games classroom and trainees are building different worlds for their video games. In film rooms, music videos, short films and documentaries are being tweaked ready for marking. 

The students (or “trainees”, as they’re called here) are in overdrive, finishing off their final projects for their annual showcase Unseen, Unplayed, Unheard next month. Leaders in the creative industry who have partnered with ELAM – including Universal Music, Playstation and VICE – will attend and hopefully give trainees their first step into the industry.

A large grey building towering over the A12 opposite Bromley-by-Bow station in East London makes for an unlikely home of the next generation of UK talent. But ELAM is unlike any other traditional sixth form, and trainees are fully in control of their schooling, commandeering entire recording studios and setting up and designing their own performance spaces.

The aim is for all trainees to leave after two years equipped with the skills, knowledge and self-confidence to bypass university and go straight into the creative arts. It’s something especially important to Ayesha Allen, ELAM’s assistant principal of industry readiness. “Increasingly, universities look more like a three-year barrier,” she says. “Students will come here, love it, go into uni, and then feel like [they’re] just creating more of a distance between themselves and what they want to do.”

Will Kennard, ELAM’s co-founder, governor and one half of electronic duo Chase & Status says his own experience of teaching at a similar school in Manchester provided the inspiration for starting the free school in 2014.

“I got to know these incredible young people at a school that offered the same kind of courses as [ELAM], but in a poorly resourced state school, like many media state schools around the country are,” he tells VICE. “The kids I came across were fantastic, incredibly talented, passionate and amazing, but the facilities and the opportunities that the school gave them weren't great. None of those kids ended up going on to really fulfil their potential.”

Kennard ended up leaving teaching and moved back to London to pursue his dream of becoming a music producer. “But it really bothered me as to why these kids did not succeed,” he says. “I went to a private school with much better facilities and opportunities. The main thing that stuck with me was the wasted potential of the talent there.”

It’s not surprising that privately-educated Kennard made it, but his old students did not. According to the Elitist Britain 2019 report, just 12 percent of those in film, TV and radio, and 18 percent in music, performing and visual arts have working class roots.

According to the same report, twenty percent of pop stars are privately educated, “nearly three times the proportion of the general population who attended a fee-paying school”.  Research by Creative Industries Federation showed that 11 percent of jobs in the creative economy are filled by BAME workers, but it should be nearly 18 percent in order to reflect the population at large.

ELAM wants to level the playing field. The academy is free to attend and trainees are offered free school meals as well as travel support. When the pandemic hit, the college’s laptops were loaned out to trainees who did not have exclusive use of a computer at home, and the school made use of a Vodafone SIM card scheme to support remote learning for those without adequate internet connection.

Despite the staff’s dedication, there’s only so far they can go without change in the creative industry itself. “We know that we have this really diverse pool of talent and for whatever reason, so far, that hasn't had the effect we wanted to have on the creative industries,” says Allen. “We're working with companies on recruitment. I’m looking at improving processes and right now, they're not friendly to our students. They’re not actually welcoming our students in a way that I want them to be.

“But for me to be able to explain that, I have to understand it myself. We're having to do a lot of work at the moment to really address that and realign our whole strategy, because it's not an overnight fix.” 

It’s not just the industry that needs an overhaul. The education sector itself is often hostile to ethnic minority students. Data from the Department for Education in 2018-19 showed that Black pupils from a Caribbean background had almost twice the national average rate of short term exclusions at 10.37 percent. With 57.5 percent of trainees coming from an ethnic minority background, ELAM’s new principal Matt Sheldon is working to ensure that they have a different experience when they arrive. 

“The culture is really important,” he says. “If they come into a place where explicitly the message is ‘you are valued’, I think that takes care of so many of the frustrations that people feel they can't express – and building in a pastoral model that cares and listens but also expects people to take responsibility for themselves. Not in a ‘you're on your own’ way, but saying you have got the ability to rethink how you want to look at your future. If we get that really right, we can remove some obstacles.”

Most of the trainees tell me that they didn’t think that a career in the creative industries was possible, and that their experiences have helped them to reimagine their future. Nia, a final year music student and singer/songwriter attended a performing and creative arts school before coming to ELAM but believes the last two years made her step her craft up. “If I was to send you songs from the start of ELAM to now,” she says, “the progress is probably a bit crazy.” 

Final year film trainees Deborah, Ella and Karen show me their final project – a beautifully shot, moving documentary on Black women and hair called Halo. It’s difficult to believe that less than two years ago, they wouldn’t have known where to start with putting something like this together. Karen had no idea how to use the software she designed their logo with and only used her camera on weekends. Deborah had never tried her hand at being creative at all.

“When I first came here, I was just lost, like I didn't even know how to use a computer properly,” she says. “Maybe [over the] last six months, ELAM has really helped me overcome certain barriers. Coming in here, I had an interest in the creative industry, but I didn't know how to be in it. Now, everything I want to do in life is in the creative industries.” 

Salman, another final year film student, previously went to an all-boys secondary school and says that the experience was the direct opposite of the one he’s having at ELAM. “We didn’t have creative subjects, it was just Media Studies,” he says. “It’s been an experience coming to a mixed school. I came to ELAM and I was educated on so many things. Coming to this school has taught me to be inclusive of everybody.”

Alongside vocational courses, ELAM offers Maths and English as standard, but they are tailored to students going straight into the industry, including how to file taxes and send invoices. Its unconventional approach pays off –. even during the pandemic, attendance for remote learning was at 80 percent. “Anecdotally [for post-16 education], we were hearing that [other] colleges were really struggling with attendance, particularly for synchronous lessons like the ones we chose to run,” Allen explains.

When I ask trainees whether their experiences are different to their friends who go to mainstream sixth form colleges, they laugh. Final-year student Gabriel, the lead singer of a rock band, is particularly struck by the amount of freedom of speech he’s allowed.

“I’m a very political person in every sense, and around the time of my first show I was also educating myself on what's happening with the Windrush scandal,” he says. “It was quite impulsive, but I was just like, ‘Fuck Boris’ on the stage. I thought, ‘I’m gonna get kicked out’, but there were no repercussions because we're respected for our opinions. I'm sure that if we were in mainstream education, we wouldn't have that respect.”

“At their old schools, they might have just been the oddball individuals, like the ones just drawing anime,” Head of Film Tim Cubbit says of the trainees. “Then you put them in a room together and suddenly they [are] just empowered through their similar interests. What we’re doing here is really different. [We’re] bringing all these people together, who are appreciated and able to have the conversations that they want to have.”

If the goal is to instil confidence into the next generation of British creatives, it seems to be working. Laila, a final year games trainee, says that she’s excited to leave college in the summer and pursue a career in animation. “Maybe what we’ve said does sound cocky, but we all know that we're pushing so hard and working so hard that our skill level is way above anyone else in our age group. We are some of the best.”

@nanasbaah / @liam.hart