"Cos us young people aren't just about guns, knife crime and drugs"
So what happens when a kid gets expelled from school? For the most part, society labels them problem kids and attempts to do what it can to scrape them through the education system, leaving their futures to be dictated by the decisions they made as a teenager.
Pupil Referral Units are centres designed to provide an alternative to mainstream education for such students. Over the past year a massive project has been underway to build a state-of-the-art music centre in one of those PRUs – The Tunmarsh Centre. The EOTO Media Team, documented the whole project from start to finish and interviewed some of the stakeholders involved: the investors, the teachers and most importantly the students to find out why such an investment was necessary and how it would benefit the young people there.
It was clear that there was a massive failure on the part of the government to acknowledge the positives that young people have to offer; and in fact, they were guilty of an over focus on their negatives. A strong point which resonated throughout the video which was the importance of music as a channel and outlet, as well as a distraction from problems that young people may face on a daily basis.
The benefits for the students would invariably be immense, but in the larger scope of things, this was only one project, from one charity, for one school. We hope to put pressure not only on the government, but on the private companies who have the means, actively encouraging them to provide and invest in the same way that EOTO has done to ensure that we aren’t left with a lost generation whose talents and potential achievements are overshadowed by their mistakes.