– Arrival date in your project: 16th June 2018
– Departure date from your project (back home): 21st June 2018
– Hosting project: Australia

I was fortunate enough to visit the incredible staff and students at Westside Circus for just under a week during June of this year. The experience of being with Charlotte from Everything is Possible and meeting so many brilliant people was something I found incredibly inspiring, and allowed me to experience activities and places which I’d never thought possible prior to my involvement.

My name is Mike Hugill, and in my role as an English teacher in a York (UK) secondary school, my day-to-day activities centre around teaching and exploring the English language, and analysing literary texts from a variety of time periods and contexts.

Westside Circus are based in Melbourne, Australia, and ‘use circus and physical theatre to stimulate creativity and make a tangible difference to the lives of young people from diverse backgrounds’. Visiting Westside and some of its partners really exposed us to the benefits that the circus can bring to a plethora of families across the state of Victoria.

Whilst there, a lot of the work we did revolved around set design and observations of sessions taught by some of the staff employed by Westside. We were also lucky enough to visit a local secondary school in which sessions are run by Westside staff as part of their physical education/games lessons. Witnessing the enjoyment the pupils of varying physical and cognitive abilities gleaned from the sessions allowed us to reflect on the role of circus and other forms of physical activity in the secondary classroom back in the UK, and certainly highlighted a vast array of benefits and skills such as teamwork, co-ordination and leadership.

We spent a huge portion of our time with Simon Clarke and Jane Hartnell, two inspirational people who pour their efforts into Westside Circus and its international links with National Treasures. Both were able to provide many opportunities to show how I could weave the aforementioned skills and experiences into my own day-to-day teaching, as well as using them to benefit the lives of our own pupils back in York. Currently, the local authority is devoting more time and effort to exploring alternative education opportunities for our young people, and perhaps one day the circus will be something predominantly taught or experienced in UK schools and learning environments in comparison with a special treat out for the family.