Last year in February we ran a tutor training weekend support by a grant from the Musician’s Benevolent Fund. This was a really exciting venture for Shooting Roots: our first funded training project for a few years. It was a chance to secure quality training for our tutors and hopefully set us up for the years to come.

We invited Paul Wilson (Wren Music) and Joe Broughton (Albion Band, UFQ, Birmingham Conservatoire) to act as mentors for us during the weekend.

Our overall aim was to develop a workshop practise that encourages excellence from our participants and tutors whilst remaining fun for everyone in a mixed ability setting. This was two pronged: a focus on good practise within workshopping as well as looking at the specific challenge of bringing challenging material into a mixed setting.

During and after the event we collated lots of feedback from tutors. The response was overwhelmingly positive: every tutor took something away from the weekend which helped over the coming months and would be interested in a similar opportunity again.

We hope to run more projects like this in future. In the meantime we will be focusing on sharing the skills already accumulated within our tutor group. The first opportunity for this will be our tutor training weekend coming up this June in readiness for this summer’s festivals. Exciting!

If you want to read our evaluation report please click on the link below.

Raising the Game Evaluation Report