University Students’ Support for Ledbury Poetry Festival Leads to New Role for Graduate

A University of Worcester graduate is embarking on an exciting new role inspired by an internship at this year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival.

Jacob Briscombe was one of three students who volunteered as artist management interns at the poetry festival, now in its 28^th year, and has now secured another internship as a Programme Assistant at arts company Severn Arts.

“It opened me up to other avenues,” said Jacob, who has just graduated from his Film Studies and Screenwriting degree. “If I didn’t have this experience I don’t think I would have applied [to other arts and culture related internships]. I didn’t know how much work went on behind the scenes. It’s amazing how much work goes on and each of these roles is important. If you don’t want to be the artist yourself, there are other ways.”

University of Worcester students have undertaken internships at the Ledbury Poetry Festival for the last several years, giving them hands-on work experience and helping to boost their employability. This approach is among the reasons that the University is shortlisted for University of the Year in the Times Higher Education Awards. Worcester is top for jobs in the UK, with the highest rate of sustained employment, further study or both, from any multidisciplinary university (Longitudinal Education Outcomes Survey 2017-25).

The students’ roles at the Festival included chaperoning artists to their events, ensuring they had everything they needed and working collaboratively with the festival producer and technician teams to ensure artists were happy with the set up. The students also got to attend a variety of events.

Alongside artist management, Jacob also took some photos for the Festival’s social media.

“It’s opened my eyes [to the possibilities] but also the arts in general, different forms of art. It’s just shown me how much I love the arts and how many different forms of art there are and how not to be reductive and reduce the arts to certain things.”

Jacob felt that it also honed some key skills. “It’s definitely helped me with confidence,” he said. “Timing was a big thing and constant communication. It taught me how to deal with pressure. There may be points of stress, but I’m more confident to deal with that kind of thing.”

Director of Ledbury Poetry Festival, Amy Howard, praised the support from University of Worcester students in pulling off one of its most successful events.

Ms Howard said: “The incredible festival interns were absolutely integral to making the festival happen! Without them the smooth running of events would have been much more difficult.”

This year’s Ledbury Poetry Festival attracted several well-known names, including Simon Armitage, Jackie Kay, Roger McGough and Michael Rosen.

Ms Howard said: “Alongside that we had some other incredibly interesting and important events. To some extent the physical scale of the festival is dictated by the very thing that makes us unique; our setting within a small, rural, market town. But the use of live-streaming and recorded events has opened up new audiences and new ways of engaging in recent years and this is something that grown year on year.”

Now Festival organisers are gearing up for their first ever winter mini-festival weekend, Winter Words, taking place November 20-23.