At the start of February, Dawn Bowden MS, Deputy Minister for Arts and Sport, and Chief Whip, announced more than £1.5m for 17 high quality skills and training projects within the creative industries. M-SParc is pleased to announce that we are running one of those successful projects.
The creative industries have been one of the fastest-growing parts of the Welsh economy for nearly a decade, creating jobs and wealth, contributing to a strong national brand, and promoting Wales in the world. M-SParc has been running the Creative North Network in the region for the past two years, and we’re excited to continue supporting the Network with this project. The project is branded ‘Creative Sparc’.
Receiving funding and support from Welsh Government via Creative Wales, ‘Creative Sparc’ includes providing Low Carbon Reviews to companies in the sector, to ensure they are well-placed to tie into ALBERT and the industry’s increasing low-carbon requirements. This supports in making north Wales companies better placed to bid for work.
The funding aims, amongst other things, to support more people to be aware of and go into Creative-Digital careers. To support this, we’ll be re-opening our successful Skills Academy, providing 6-month work placements to support 10 businesses and 10 individuals and, hopefully, leading to permanent careers in the Creative-Digital sector.
We’ll also be going into secondary schools to run the Creative-Digital strand of our new Skill-SParc programme, responding to the shortage of Newsreaders in the region! Along the way, children will learn skills including podcasting, researching, and presenting facts, alongside digital skills. We’ll also be offering work experience for two students from each of the schools, in the Creative-Digital sector.
These will be delivered by our in-house experts here at M-SParc; our Life Cycle Assessment Officer, and Skills Officers who have years of teaching experience. We can’t wait to support taking Creative-Digital to the next level in north Wales.
