Creative Partnership Celebrations at the De La Warr Pavilion

Over 150 children and parents attended the fun event, held to celebrate and share the early years' work which, Programmer Beatrice Cole said had been a "fantastic result."

Explaining what the Creative Partnerships had achieved and what the day involved she said:

"Creative Partnerships has been running for three years in Hastings, St Leonards, Bexhill and Camber in various schools and settings and, the idea for today was for it to be a kind of festival of a culmination of the three year's work. We've got five different arts practitioners here today carrying out different sessions. This is the early years with all the children being under five and we've encouraged them all to come and participate in the celebration."

Children could move around and interact with the varied work-shop sessions spending time with each of the arts practitioners and trying their hand at wood work, drama, shadow puppetry, poetry, and story telling.

In addition there was the opportunity to watch some of the Creative Partnerships' films which encompassed some of their projects.

There have been over thirty similar events held within East Sussex and Beatrice said: "This is just one event in a two week festival and today is really to show the benefits of early years practitioners and young people working with artists. It also gives people the opportunity to come and talk to us, as often they hear so much about Creative Partnerships and don't know what it's about, so we thought this would be a good opportunity to open our doors and let people see what it's actually like for the children and also to experience for themselves what the projects involve."

One of the creative artists at the event, captivating the children with his story telling, was Kevin Graal.

He is a strong believer in the importance of using creativity in learning from an early age as he feels it creates a firm foundation and gives children the potential to grow.

He said: "The Creative Partnerships is about linking artists of various kinds, like painters and singers and story tellers usually at schools, but in recent years they've also been doing a lot of work trying to go right back to the beginning to make links with early years and that's why I think this work is so important. Children don't start being creative and experimenting with their creativity at a certain age, they are born creative, and so the earlier you start getting them used to exploring music, listening to stories and telling their own stories the better."

Children were clearly enthralled by one of Kevin's stories which he described as an "Zimbabwe folktale", and included an action song which they joyfully participated in throughout. Finally Kevin invited them to use their imaginations further by encouraging them to make suggestions of how they thought the story would end.

Kevin also emphasised the importance of the roles that adults in young children's lives make.

He said: "What's fantastic is that all the adults who work with these pre-school children, whether it's with Sure Start centres or as individual child minders, understand the spirit of the thing, which is that if they join in and enter the fun of the whole activity then the children have a role model. When children see the adult in their life enjoying themselves and having fun it makes it OK for them to enter the spirit of the thing themselves. For me, as a storyteller working with pre-school children, you need all the adults involved to model the responses that you want the children to do - it's vital that the adults who work with the children all join in and they've all been great today."

One parent, Martina Gavan, enthused about the impact that the Creative Partnership initiative had, had on her two year old daughter Freya.

She recently took part in a ten week creative dance event which was held at the Hollington Childrens centre and was one of the events being celebrated.

Martina said that Freya had thoroughly enjoyed the whole creative dance experience, adding: "Freya absolutely loved it because it was a bit of structure but it was creative at the same time. The whole stance was based on our experiences of Hastings and how we feel about where we live, the children were prancing around pretending to be animals and birds and it was great because along with the creative dance artists that came to teach the children there were the creche workers there as well. This gave us the chance to all dance together for a while and then the Mum's could do a bit of dance on their own, which was very therapeutic; we could relax as we knew the children were playing and being taken care of in the next room. It was all a very nice atmosphere. Although it was just a one off thing, hopefully it will carry on, I hope that the funding will continue so that we can do more. "

Beatrice believes that the government's initiative to bring creativity into learning has so far been a great success and that it will continue for the foreseeable future.

She said: "Our future funding has been confirmed and it's definitely going to continue and in fact it's getting bigger and broader and we are moving into a bigger geographical area encompassing Surrey and West Sussex. We're getting to work with more and more schools and settings. The government has recognised the importance of creativity in learning and they have pilot programme's for the next phase which is known as a 'cultural offer'. This is a new initiative that's coming out will give children be five hours of culture and creativity every week."

She added: "It's been a huge amount of work as so much planning goes into it but it's gone really well."

For more information on Creative Partnerships visit the website at:www.creative-partnerships.com/HastingsAndEastSussex