Celebrations at Five Islands Academy!

Our partnership with the Isles of Scilly Museum, through which we set up our Pop Up Exhibitions and produced the ‘Being Scilly’ magazine, has won the 'Community Initiative' award at the Cornwall Heritage Awards this week. 

Mrs Lewin represented FIA in accepting the award, supported on Zoom by Kate Hale, Jeremy Brown and Tammy Bedford as our community parters, but the stars of the show were Harrison, Henry and Tia, each of whom were spotlighted on the Zoom stage in front of 100 attendees at the ceremony to take a bow and say thank you, which they did with charm and aplomb. Harrison talked about the hard work the students had put into the project, Henry highlighted the great partnership work with the Isles of Scilly Museum, and Tia summed up our sense of surprise and delight in being granted the award, to everyone’s admiration.  As the organiser of the event said, “the 3 students who joined us certainly stole the show!” 

We would like to say a very warm thank you to Jeremy Brown from the great team at our Creative Islands Partnership, for all he did to drive this project forward, and to all our partners who have enabled us to engage with our community and its history in such a hands on, inspiring way: Kate Hale, the Isles of Scilly Museum’s Curator and her Trustees, and Cultural Destinations and FEAST who supported us with funding to produce this award-winning publication.  Thanks also to Museum volunteers Judy and Sarah and to Ms Broadhurst in both her school and Museum trustee roles. Judy hosted the initial visits to the Museum and with Sarah and Ms Broadhurst supported the students in their final presentations. In addition Ms Broadhurst used the artefacts from the Museum to inspire some exceptional Year 7 creative writing. 

We are now working on the next stages of our Museum Project: a prototype website for our Five Islands Academy Pop Up Museum which is being designed by this year’s Year 7s, and collaboration with Kate Hale on an islands-wide heritage app. So this project has really awakened partnership potential between the school and the museum in a powerful and long-lasting way.