On Friday, we had to take the difficult decision to suspend our Smashed Project live tours across England and Northern Ireland, due to Coronavirus.
With increasing concern from schools, who’d already begun prohibiting external visitors, as well as a duty of care to our own teams and their health, we felt we’d reached a point where moving from school to school on a busy schedule would no longer be good practice. Internally, we’re also minimising face to face meetings and encouraging working from home where possible.Instead of receiving the live programme, we’ve provided schools with online tools to use in place of Smashed live which we hope teachers will find useful and young people will enjoy in our absence.

Given the uncertainty around the impact of the virus, all we can say at this stage is that we fully intend to revisit all cancelled schools with the Smashed Project next academic year.

We are, of course, sorry for any inconvenience caused. Our teams are so disappointed as they love delivering Smashed, but we’ve had a fabulous few months of touring, with some of the most incredible feedback and strongest results we’ve ever seen! A huge thanks to all our touring teams and everyone who has taken part in the project this year.

We plan to use this time to further develop the project for the new academic year with improvements to our live tours, evaluation methods and our online offering too so watch this space!