East Summer School returns to the Olympic Park

East Bank was built on a promise that the cultural quarter would belong to the boroughs around it rather than to the people who could afford to visit it. East Summer School is the part of that promise with an attendance register.

The programme ran across Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park from 27 July to 7 August 2026, for young people aged 12 to 17 who live or study in Hackney, Newham, Tower Hamlets or Waltham Forest. It is free to take part.

Who is actually teaching

This is where it stops sounding like a council holiday scheme. The programme is delivered with the institutions based in the park’s East Bank quarter: BBC Music Studios, Sadler’s Wells East, UAL’s London College of Fashion, UCL, V&A East and ABBA Voyage.

The sessions are specific rather than general-purpose: flood-resilient neighbourhood mapping at UCL, inclusive dance at Sadler’s Wells East, fashion history at UAL, content creation for the BBC’s Asian Network, exhibition curation at V&A East, and backstage tours at ABBA Voyage.

Backstage at ABBA Voyage is worth pausing on. It is one of the most technically advanced shows running anywhere, and the number of sixteen-year-olds who have been shown how it works is very small.

The numbers

In 2025, more than 300 young people attended 24 workshops. This year participants chose one activity per week rather than sampling everything — a change that trades breadth for actually finishing something.

It ends with a showcase at the ArcelorMittal Orbit, where participants present their work to parents, carers and community supporters.

Why the four boroughs

Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park sits across Newham, Tower Hamlets, Waltham Forest and Hackney, which is the reason a programme based there reaches an audience no single borough’s own provision does. It is also the reason the eligibility rule is drawn the way it is: the park is the shared thing, so the catchment is everyone whose borough touches it.

Skills for the future are developing at pace, so we want to make sure children and young people from east London don’t miss out, and that Queen Elizabeth Olympic Park institutions can help prepare them for the jobs of tomorrow.

Shazia Hussain, chief executive of the London Legacy Development Corporation

The machinery behind it

East Summer School is led by the London Legacy Development Corporation and supported by the East End Community Foundation, now in its second year of backing it. It forms part of East Ed, an LLDC initiative connecting young people and educators with East Bank organisations, employers and universities.

Which is the answer to the obvious question about a two-week summer course: on its own it is a fortnight, and inside East Ed it is an introduction with somewhere to go next.