GRAFFITI art, filmmaking and street dance were just some of the activities youngsters at a village school took part in during a year-long project to improve their creative thinking.

Giles School in Old Leake was one of just two schools in Lincolnshire chosen to be involved on the Creative Partnerships Enquiry School Scheme.

As a result, 165 year-nine students at the school have been working with artists in residence, movie editor and website designer Steve Pitwell, hype dancer Anna Olejnicki and graffiti artist A.Dee.

The school held an Urban Arts Day to celebrate the completion of the project.

Lead teacher in the scheme Wendi Streather told the Target: "The Giles School was one of only two schools that were accepted for the Creative Partnership Scheme this year which aims to improve pupils creative thinking skills and work with other subject areas to achieve a more creative curriculum.

"As we are a specialist arts college we were honoured to be chosen to take part in the scheme.

"Part of the scheme involved the pupils taking control of what they were being taught by outside artists.

"The pupils interviewed the artists and appointed their own selection for the Urban Arts Day.

"They appointed an artist who works in film and music to help them to create their own short movies, a hype dancer who taught them to choreograph their own routines and a graffiti artist who worked with the entire year group to produce a permanent graffiti mural.

"Other activities included creating graffiti tags as key rings and stencil posters in the style of the artist Banksy."

Ms Streather revealed the scheme had bought £4,000 of funding into the school for creative projects and its success could now lead to even bigger things.

She said: "We are hoping to go to the next stage of the Creative Partnership project and eventually achieve creative school status.

"This would be an enormous achievement for the staff and pupils at the school and reflect the hard work that they have been putting into the scheme since last October."