A New Direction (AND) is an award-winning non-profit organisation committed to ensuring London’s schoolchildren have curriculum-based opportunities to engage with arts and culture – a goal made much more difficult to achieve with the arrival of Covid-19.

AND’s work fostering collaboration between arts and cultural organisations and the capital’s schools was seriously hampered as a result of creatives such as authors, poets and artists being unable to visit classrooms due to the pandemic.

In these extraordinary circumstances, AND wanted to deliver new support for the education and cultural sectors – and a response to the pandemic that would ensure children could continue to learn about the capital’s culture and develop their own creative potential.

Rethinking engagement
Though a series of workshops and conversations, we worked with AND to develop the concept of its RESET programme, an engagement strategy aimed at helping the education and cultural sectors find new ways of working together.

This included creating the RESET initiative’s visual brand identity, as well as a series of practical tools aimed at AND’s target audiences.

For schools, we designed engaging new learning resources – which can be used by students in a home-learning setting if necessary – that creatively explore the impact and opportunity that Covid has had on young Londoners’ lives and learning.

And for the arts and cultural community, we designed a collaboration plan to help organisations or individual artists think about how they could adapt their work or facilities to suit collaboration with schools in pandemic conditions.

We love working with clients to find innovative solutions to their problems – so what could be better than a RESET of the way AND does things?