AN ARTS education project run by Okehampton?s Wren Music has been ranked alongside the Tate Modern on the shortlist for a National Lottery Award. The community arts development charity now needs local votes to help it stand a chance of winning the competition. Wren?s lottery-funded ?Nice Warm Socks? project won it a place on the shortlist for the title of best arts project funded by the national charity. It is one of only ten arts projects across the whole country to be selected ? as well as the Tate Modern, other projects competing against it include a Glasgow media centre and a theatre/cinema complex in Caernarfon. The Nice Warm Socks project uses folk song to develop the basic communication skills of children with severe learning difficulties and physical impairments. With almost £5,000 of funding from the National Lottery Awards For All scheme, the Wren Music team of professional composers, musicians, songwriters and educators worked together with speech and language therapy specialist Shan Graebe, and staff and students from the Ellen Tinkham School in Exeter, to create songs relevant to young people with special educational needs. The success of the project led to wide interest from other special needs schools and from speech and language therapists across the UK and farther afield. With their advice and feedback, Wren developed a package which included a professionally recorded audio CD of 17 songs, backed up by a range of free resource materials, scores, and notes for teachers on a website. Since this was released in late 2006, interest has continued to grow. Nice Warm Socks received very good reviews in specialist journals, and is now being used both across the UK and abroad. Spokesperson for the project Marilyn Tucker said: ?It has been so successful that we?ve received orders for the CD from as far afield as Italy and the USA.? Nice Warm Socks is also now being widely used in mainstream education, to help develop early-years language skills. Voting for the best lottery-funded arts project began earlier this month and will close at mid-day on August 3. The three projects with the highest number of votes will then go through to a semi-final, with the winning project featuring on a prime-time television show on BBC1, as well as receiving £2,000 to spend on their project. Marilyn Tucker said that Wren are delighted just to have been shortlisted. ?Its great to have reached this far in the National Lottery Awards, and we?re really hoping the public get behind us and vote,? she said. To vote for Wren, either go to the lottery?s website at http://www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk">www.lotterygoodcauses.org.uk or call 0845 386 8062 ? calls from a landline cost 1.5p. The winner will be announced on BBC1 on September 15. For further information about Nice Warm Socks visit the project?s website http://www.nicewarmsocks.org.uk">www.nicewarmsocks.org.uk