Upriser – Collaboration between Leith Academy and The Leith Agency
Upriser at Leith Academy
Information for Young People:
Did you know YOU can have a career in the creative industry?
The creative industry is more than just TV adverts, billboards and celebrities. It’s TikTok content, Snapchat filters and working with influencers. It’s creating iconic logos, the code behind your favourite website, the graphics behind the latest game. It’s even spreadsheets of numbers and handling the business behind it all.
It’s not all about drawing or writing. The creative industry is full of all types of people: the organised and the disorganised; those good with numbers and those better with words; people who are great at speaking to a group and those who prefer to communicate via screens; those who like to create things with their hands and those who like to work things out in their heads.
However you learn and express yourself, there’s a spot for you here.
At Leith Academy, we value education of all forms. And now, we have a partnership with the Leith Agency, an award-winning creative agency, that can help show you what a career in the creative industry actually looks like.
This is a hugely exciting opportunity for students at our school to engage in a range of interesting and informative activities in partnership with the Leith Agency. Over the next 6 years, we will be working together to develop the creativity and skills of our students to prepare you to make a success of life beyond school and within the creative industry. You’ll see the Leith Agency in classes, in workshops, in careers events and in ways in which we promote skills development and the creative industry at school. They are here to work with us on helping you achieve your best and to see that everyone has a potential place within their sphere of work.
If you’re interested, speak to Mr Stewart, who can put you in contact with the Leith Agency.
Information for Parents:
Upriser was founded by Saatchi & Saatchi in 2022 in response to a ‘creative crisis’: a sustained lack of funding for creative and cultural programmes in school in England – equating to just £9.40 a year per student[1] – which is on track to deal a devastating blow to the UK’s creative output due to a lack of future talent coming into the industry. Whilst the funding situation is better in Scotland, the creative industry still requires fresh talent and young people to help it grow and flourish as it should.
Designed to inspire with the power of creativity, Upriser offers young people aged 11-18 a real, tangible introduction and route into the creative industries. To help inspire more future talent across the UK, Upriser has expanded across the UK.
Leith Academy is working with Leith, a 40-year-old advertising agency whose Tennent’s Caledonia or IRN-BRU’s Snowman advert you may remember, to facilitate meaningful change as a school partner.
Leith has a commitment to encourage people coming into the creative services from non-traditional routes to strengthen diversity across gender, social background, and ethnic identity within the industry. Their goal is to lift the curtain on the creative industry, and encourage students to consider it as a viable, accessible, and successful career to have.
[1] https://www.theguardian.com/education/2021/jul/15/creativity-crisis-looms-for-english-schools-due-to-arts-cuts-says-labour
