ATG INSPIRE Stoke is a small but impactful team of three delivering large-scale, high-quality creative engagement opportunities across Stoke-on-Trent and Staffordshire.

The team, which includes Josh, Emma and Phebe, reached 5,841 participants between April 2025 and March 2026. They have created meaningful, accessible opportunities for people of all ages to engage with arts and culture, ensuring that creativity remains at the heart of the local community.

The team run the Regent Theatre Academy, a weekly programme supporting six to 18 year olds to develop confidence, performance skills and friendships in a safe and professional theatre environment.

Across 61 sessions during 2025 to 2026 the Academy engaged 138 young people through acting, singing and dance training.

The team has further expanded opportunities through specialist half-term workshops and adult masterclasses for people aged over 18, addressing a clear gap in creative opportunities for adults within Stoke-on-Trent.

A major achievement for the team this year was the production of 026 Dance: Rewind, celebrating the Regent Theatre’s 25th annual dance festival. The festival brought together more than 1,200 performers aged  three to 89 years from across Staffordshire and beyond, celebrating community, creativity and the history of the event. With an audience of more than 3,100 attendees, the festival reinforced the Regent Theatre’s role as a vital cultural hub and provided one of the region’s largest platforms for community dance performance.

A standout achievement was the delivery of Speak Up, a national secondary school co-creation programme run in partnership with the National Theatre as part of the Theatre Nations Partnership. From 2023-2025, ATG INSPIRE Stoke engaged 4,841 Key Stage 3 participants across five schools. The programme connected young people with 14 specialist artists, five local practitioners and eight teachers, giving students access to an extraordinary range of artforms. Outcomes included students launching socially driven clothing brands and designing hoodies exploring issues such as modesty wear for Muslim girls, tackling toxic masculinity in football and youth voting rights. They also collaborated with a music artist to write and produce an original rap song and music video examining the impact of the cost of living crisis on teenagers and worked with an animation artist and creative writer to create a stop-motion animation inspired by their self-written poem, A Recipe for a Better World.

The project culminated in a celebration event at Alton Towers Resort in July 2025, bringing together 107 young people, teachers, artists and guests from ATG Entertainment and the National Theatre. The event, themed The Thrill of the Arts, celebrated the creativity and voices of young people in Stoke-on-Trent through co-created artwork. One teacher described Speak Up as “a wonderful opportunity to immerse our students in the thrill of the arts, beyond the confines of the curriculum,” adding that young people experienced “strands of the arts which they had never encountered before,” while developing transferable skills including “time management, teamwork, empathy, self-care and more.”

ATG Inspire Stoke has entered the Team of the Year category of University of Staffordshire Business Awards.