North Liverpool Academy hosted the 10th annual Merseyside Police Act Together Gala Evening last week. Act Together is a joint partnership initiative, involving Merseyside Police, City Safe, Liverpool City Council, Merseyside Fire & Rescue Service, Merseytravel, Young Addaction and Riverside Housing.
Individual schools work together with specialist mentors to create a short piece of drama or dance, themed around anti-social behaviour. The schools then present this piece of work to other young people, with the hope that it will dissuade them from engaging in anti-social behaviour.
The Gala Evening is a celebration of those production as the participating schools gather to perform their work to an audience of family, friends and partner agencies. Childwall Abbey School, Redbridge High School, Bank View High School and Broadgreen International School all performed alongside North Liverpool Academy during this year’s initiative.
The night was a great success and we were privileged to have in attendance Merseyside Police Chief Constable, Andy Cooke, Chief Superintendent, Peter Costello, and Mayoral lead for Community Safety Councillor, Emily Spurrell. The Chief Constable congratulated our students for their hard work, commitment and engagement with the process and was extremely impressed with the quality of work produced.
All of the young performers thoroughly enjoyed sharing their performances and were praised for tackling community issues in such a creative and inspiring way. Throughout the creative process each school worked with a professional mentor to support them with the reality of the themes they had chosen to address.
North Liverpool Academy worked very closely with ‘Prevent’ who are part of the Contest strategy introduced by the government to help reduce the risk of terrorism in the UK. Prevent has a specific role to educate local communities about radicalisation. Our students’ role in the strategy involved producing a short film, which they were extremely proud of.
Year 13 Arts students worked with PC Heather Moon and Hana Greaves, a teacher at the Academy, to create a 15 minute film to educate students about the various stage of radicalisation.
As part of the ‘Prevent’ strategy, this film will be shared with other schools across Merseyside. Throughout the process we worked closely with our media department, who played a vital role in supporting us throughout the project. PC Baines was also integral to the success of the project, he mentored the students throughout and overseen the event.
North Liverpool Academy are proud to have supported the Merseyside Police Act Together project for 10 consecutive years. During that time our students have delivered more than 70 performances to almost 13,000 young people from across Liverpool, covering subjects on gangs, happy slapping, cannabis, hate crime, knife crime, cyber bullying and nitrous oxide abuse.