hr-monogram

My portfolio for Communications Lead

Table of Contents

Recruitment promos for the London Symphony Chorus

I am adept at both short-form and long-form messaging. These two films which I shot and edited for the London Symphony Chorus show this clearly; the first is a punchy 60-second short, and the second is a longer documentary short with a more exploratory feel. I am used to putting interviewees at ease, even when they’re not used to being in front of a camera, and working with music is one of my favourite skills.

Online Tour of the National Theatre

This project was designed to showcase a range of careers in theatre to students in secondary education and FE, with a particular focus on technical and production arts. It was also designed to appeal to general audiences who wanted to know more about the wonderful community of “showpeople” behind the scenes. Produced in the earliest days of web video (2008-9), the innovative Flash-based non-linear interface and rich layers of content led to my team and me receiving a BAFTA nomination for ‘TV Craft: Interactive Creative Contribution’.

The purposes, benefits and keys to success of an opera education programme

A video I made as part of the application process to be Director of Education at Glyndebourne Opera about 10 years ago. I didn’t get that particular job, but it remains a great example of the engaging way in which I present ideas to audiences at conferences, potential funders, or colleagues within an organisation. Part of the presentation focuses on how collaboration with other organisations is so important in the arts.

This video also showcases how I can use examples from a specific art form in a creative and metaphorical way to promote that art form specifically, or the power of the arts in general. The 3-part structure of this presentation uses:

  • Figaro (from Rossini’s Il barbiere di Siviglia) to represent an arts programme’s energetic engagement with the whole community
  • Captain Vere (from Britten’s Billy Budd, who describes himself as “a man of action … I have also read books”) to demonstrate the potential synergy of practical and theoretical approaches to the curriculum
  • Hans Sachs (from Wagner’s Die Meistersinger von Nürnberg) representing the potential cross-curricular fusion of all arts, and art’s ability to change lives.

Latest website for the Noisy Classroom

I recently rebuilt noisyclassroom.com from the group up, using WordPress and the Voxel Theme also used by campaignforthearts.org.

Done on a tight budget, the website can now be improved gradually over time, based on a solid new infrastructure using the Voxel Theme’s ability to construct relationships between various CPTs (custom post types), and search-based functionalities across well-indexed taxonomies. It also will significantly reduce long-term costs, as Voxel’s native membership, eCommerce and CPT functionalities are being used to replace several paid-for plugins for membership, WooCommerce and event ticketing.

The new homepage at noisyclassroom.com.
The home page for the Cicero Cup programme needed to convey a large amount of information, while also upselling the Noisy Classroom's key income generating programme for primary schools. Particular care was taken for it to work equally as well on desktop and mobile devices.
Various custom post types are combined in a new searchable database of topic-based resources, designed to scale up dramatically in mid-2025 as Noisy Classroom rolls the entire Up for Debate programme (see below) into the main website.

SeeHearTeach CPD brochure

This brochure of my pre-Covid CPD offer for teachers gives an overview of communications training programmes that I have developed and delivered for fellow educators. I wrote and designed the entire publication entirely by myself, using Adobe Creative Suite (InDesign, Illustrator and Photoshop) and an attractive mix of stock images, and photographs of my actual programmes.

The content for my ‘Video & Podcasting for Educators’ and ‘Pro Writing & Design Skills’ courses is particularly relevant to the role of Communications Lead. I’d look forward to sharing my skills and knowledge within the Campaing for the Arts, and wider arts community. I create impactful documents and presentations that stay on brand.

You may notice that this is a Scottish version of the brochure. My in-depth knowledge of Scotland’s very different education set-up is another thing I could bring to the Campaign for the Arts. I am hugely impressed by the Campaign for the Arts being the only UK-wide campaigning organisation I can immediately think of to really leverage successful campaigns in Holyrood and north of the Border to exemplify the potential for wider change.

Up for Debate programme for the PiXL Club

The Up for Debate programme was written, designed and produced predominantly by me, in collaboration with Debbie Newman from the Noisy Classroom. Alongside my BAFTA nomination it is one of the twin highlights of my career.

PDF & print resources

The viewer below contains excerpts from the core handbook and KS3 scheme of work for the programme, written and designed by me in Adobe InDesign. This was supplemented by three further books, and a suite of 30 videos running at over 3 hours in total. I also helped manage and deliver a parallel programme of live training events for teachers, and competition days for pupils. These were held at a range of venues around the UK, from the University of Sunderland and University of Northampton in the north and Midlands, to UCL and Harrow School in the south.

Promotional film

I shot, edited and animated this video in the programme’s first year (2016), to explain the benefits of it to teachers of KS3 English in PiXL’s network of state schools across the country.

Two films featuring Professor Ivan O'Pinion and Hugh de Syde

In my role as an arts educator, I also appeared in the films! My two characters of Professor Ivan O’Pinion and Hugh de Syde were a cost-efficient way for me to create a large number of educational films on a low budget. In all of these, I did literally everything: writing, self-taping, editing, and creating simple but effective animations. They also give a sense of my playful and age-appropriate way of engaging with students in primary schools and at KS3.

The first video is from our introductory scheme of work, exploring how to share ideas as part of a team, using the special note-sharing frames I designed:

The second video is from our series of ‘stimulus videos’ which introduce students quickly to a topic before they start to prepare. These use some basic AfterEffects to put Ivan and Hugh in a TV studio for their news show On That Point. Produced in 2018, this video was for the motion “This House believes that Elizabeth II should be the last monarch of the United Kingdom”.

Social media threads, including amplifying others' voices

I greatly enjoy leveraging the power of social media to connect people from various backgrounds with interesting ideas and events. On a personal level, I spend a lot of time on Facebook, where I curate lively discussions about arts, education, politics and society. I am also increasingly active on LinkedIn, where I try to expand the norms of the professional network beyond its current bland tendencies towards self-promotion, and more towards interesting topics of both general and specific professional interest.

Below are three X threads that I’ve created / curated recently:

A thread from @noisyclassroom‘s X account, summing up the Grand Finals Day of our Cicero Cup National Primary Schools Debating Championship, which we held at Hampton Court Palace in June 2024. Just one example of communications from an event which I also co-organised.

A retweet from my ‘social and political’ X account @haroldraitt of a long thread from my education account @mr_raitt, amplifying the voices of colleagues and allies at a conference on the legacy of slavery and need for reparations, which I attended in Birmingham in June 2024.

A recent thread from my education account @mr_raitt, part of a social media debacle around controversial education organisation @researched1. While the brouhaha arose from the current conflict in the Middle East, I chose to focus my contribution on the important (and less controversial) issue of the governance failures which had led to the unfortunate incident occuring. This was then used as a primary source of quotes in an article by independent education journalist Warwick Mansell. 

Die Walküre promo for Regents Opera

I am a passionate supporter of independent fringe theatre and opera. Regents Opera’s Ring Cycle is one of the most visionary and ambitious projects in the whole of 21st century music theatre, and I was delighted to donate my time, expertise and film kit to create this trailer entirely pro bono. The main video footage was recorded entirely solo (self-shooting) with a multi-camera set-up at a CD recording in March 2022. I then recut the content several times to promote Das Rheingold and Die Walküre, updating the narrative each time to suit the marketing needs, and make use of additional relevant production photography.

Greenwich Free School: Where do you want to go next in life?

The ethos of an organisation is tremendously important to me. This is a film I made about Greenwich Free School when it was a pioneering new organisation with a warm and distinct ethos.

Grimeborn Overture, co-created with students from BSix College

Wherever possible, I like to involve young people in my work, and pass on my own skills to them. This ‘Grimeborn Overture’ film about the rehearsals and production process for Tosca at the Arcola Theatre in Hackney was created with the help of two BTEC students from BSix College in Hackney. It was their first involvement with opera, and their first experience working on documentary. But I also learned a huge amount from them, and they were particularly key to helping convey some of the ‘grime’ influences behind the name of the Grimeborn Festival.

Curriculum for Excellence and the importance of good graphic design

While studying on a PGDE course in Primary Teaching at the University of Dundee, I noticed that the poor design of the Scottish Government’s own PDFs of the national Curriculum for Excellence made it difficult to understand the curriculum easily.

Over the course of the next few years, I completely redesigned the entire curriculum documentation into new editions which I now sell. This paper (which I delivered at an education conference in Edinburgh in 2019) explores ‘The Importance of Good Design for Curriculum Documentation’ in relation to this project.

Documentary about radio/audio drama workshop with young people

In 2018 I collaborated with the UK International Radio Drama Festival to make an observational documentary about an R&D weekend on how to teach radio drama to young people at KS2, KS3 and KS4. This is a good example of how I could use my skills as a self-shooting producer/director to give deeper insights into the value of high quality arts practice that can’t easily be conveyed just in text and photos, but is abundantly obvious as part of a “don’t just say it, show it” approach.

SeeHearVote: election debates / hustings livestreamed entirely by young people from Croydon North and St Helen's North

Way back in 2010, when the BBC and ITV screened the first Leaders Debates, I was working in secondary schools in Essex through Royal Opera House Creative Partnerships, and had the idea of helping young people to engage with the political process by hosting their own livestreamed hustings for the actual candidates for MP in their constituencies. 

For various reasons, I didn’t manage to make this happen in 2010 or 2015, but when the snap election was called in 2017, I finally seized my chance. But the two videos below show what we were able to achieve in a very short time, with some notes below each with my reflections.

Because of other career commitments, I wasn’t able to further develop this format for the 2019 or 2024 general elections. And, because of the Covid pandemic, two planned projects for the 2021 Holyrood election had to be cancelled. However, the two 2017 debates set a clear precedent for what citizen youth journalists can achieve, and the techniques I have developed around working with young people in a live broadcast situation form the foundations for what I hope to achieve from my own SeeHearStudio in the Scottish Borders, and with Question Time format events in schools around the country, between now and the next UK and Holyrood general elections.

There is a clear model here for how I could work with partners (including young people and community groups) to livestream high-quality events for the Campaign of the Arts, and showcasing the power of arts and media-based activities.

These young broadcasters from St Joseph’s RC College in Croydon hadn’t engaged much with politics before the Monday morning of our 5-day project. Their transformation into a political broadcast team by the Friday morning was thrilling to behold. I didn’t manage to fit all the format ideas I had into this short week. But the key thing was that, by Friday, myself (as project director and supervising the control room for the broadcast), Tom (on the studio floor) and Amanda (in charge of sound) were, as the professionals, able to let the entire proceedings be operated and run hands-on entirely by the young people, with us in supervisory roles.

By the second week in St Helen’s, were were able to add some more features to the form, including pre-filmed VTs on each topic area to be covered in the debate, and sit-down “why did you go into politics?” chats which gave individualised roles to as many of the 30 young people as possible, and also really helped show that politicians are real people, despite the way that the media or disaffected adults often portray them!