The Knight Crew | Glyndebourne

Staged in Spring last year and featured in a three-part documentary presented by Gareth 'The Choir' Malone,  The Knight Crew marked a step-change for education at Glyndebourne.  Envisioned as ‘commissioned work of exceptional quality for young people to perform and come to as an audience’ and nearly three years in the making, this was in many ways the most ambitious – and certainly the most expensive – project ever undertaken by the education department: a professional opera premièred on the main stage, with a top-flight artistic team behind it, including Julian Philips, Glyndebourne’s first composer-in residence; a clutch of professional soloists; an orchestra over half of which (37 out of 50) was drawn from young non-professionals aged 13 to 19; a 52-strong main chorus almost entirely composed of teenagers with little if any experience, drawn from over 500 young people from local schools in poorer areas of the region; a small choral group of almost all similarly untried women, chosen to represent their mothers; and yet anotheramateur chorus composed of 12-year old boys.

 The subject matter was ambitious, too – addressing the whole vexed issue of gang-based youth culture, its obsession with respect and its tragic fixation on defending its territory, often backed up with the threat and use of knives.  Where West Side Story famously took Shakespeare’s story of Romeo and Juliet as a framing device for its tale of warring New York tribes, The Knight Crew viewed its young protagonists through the lens of the legendary King Arthur and his Knights of the Round Table.  Notions of kingship, loyalty and honour in those stories find their contemporary equivalent in the urban wasteland, where the bag-lady, Myrtle, appears to be the latest incarnation of Merlin, with the gift of prophecy: Art will be king, she says, and so it turns out to be.

 An extract from my evaluation report will be posted in due course.  In the meantime, a full account of the process - including outcomes from the evaluation – can be found at http://glyndebourne.com/story-knight-crew-project

Talking to Byron

Young people rarely get a good press, it seems.  Either they are perpetrators of anti-social activity – writ larger than ever in current headlines around the country – or they are victims of it: specifically, victims of knife crime.  As a way of helping young people to avoid such victimhood and take some responsibility for putting an end to the carrying of knives, the National Youth Theatre embarked in 2009 on an ongoing  campaign to bring an awareness of the issues to the classroom.  What made this project stand out for many from a welter of knife-crime related projects going into schools was, first, that it seemed an unlikely initiative from the most prestigious youth theatre company in the country.  Many outsiders assume the NYT is simply about producing the next generation of Great Actors – it has, indeed, acquired quite a roster of names over the last half century including the two most recent Dr Who's.  However, the NYT also has a long track record of working with young people in prison and has, in recent years, opened up access to young people without education, employment or training through its Playing Up programme.

Members of Playing Up were heavily involved not just in acting in Talking to Byron – the pilot project – but in helping Tanika Gupta to write the short play at the heart of it.  This was the other key difference: rather than adults coming in to preach, this was about young people talking to other young people.  This gave it realism and an exceptional emotional punch.  Since the pilot there has been a further 'knife crime awareness' project in Birmingham and new developments on the way.  In the process, the NYT, too, has radically changed – recognising that the division between 'mainstream' and 'educational' (or 'access') work is not only an artificial one but an obstacle to a more holistic approach to creating theatre with and for young people.

This extract from my report on the pilot project is published here for the first time by kind permission of the NYT; other than a few 'in-house' recommendations, this is the complete text of the evaluation of a highly successful initiative.

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Talking to Byron evaluation.pdf (1.02 MB)
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In transit

In arguing the case for arts-based methodologies with funders and policy-makers at higher levels, the Thames Valley Partnership provides an unusually persuasive model: while most organisations making such interventions have come out of the arts sector, and might be perceived by more sceptical outsiders as having a vested interest in developing new ‘markets’ for their services, Thames Valley Partnership was established in 1993 as a way of combining the resources of organisations from the statutory, voluntary and private sectors to find long-term, sustainable solutions to problems of crime and social exclusion and it is only over the last six years or so that it has made a decisive shift and put ‘arts at the heart’ of its approach to community safety.  That means it discovered for itself the power of the arts as a practical solution to a practical crisis.

Last May I was asked to witness and write about a dance project, devised by Judy Munday at TVP, that took just over a week to turn a group of variously 'disaffected' young people into a contemporary dance company.  This was a temporary transformation of course but it was startling.  Rather than simply examine impact, however – recognising that all good participatory arts project have this potential to change attitudes and even behaviour – Judy asked me to look at the project from a fresh angle or two. 

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In Transit.pdf (257 KB)
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New people or new dance Transit 2010.pdf (141 KB)
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Taking a journey

With young people in the news for all the wrong reasons once again and with youth services and programmes being early victims of government cuts, the project described in Taking a Journey seems even more significant than it did back in 2005.  My report, which was eventually published two years later, describes an innovative approach to reaching young people that agencies and services had not been able to engage before.  The initiative was the brainchild of Simon Dear, then at the Children's Fund on the Isle of Wight, who saw that young people themselves might help to solve this problem by being directly involved in discussions about their situation and asked how they thought services might be improved or made more relevant to them.  The third annual 'Big Day Out' of this novel consultation with young people put the arts centre stage, bringing a range of versatile theatre and music practitioners together with young people in a field beside Brading Roman Villa.  What this report does is explore the practical business – and outcomes – of a participatory arts project that found a positive politics in communal creativity.  There are hints here of how we might still pull back from the brink.

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Taking a journey.pdf (1.15 MB)
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Creating Chances

Creating Chances came out in 2003 but remains, I hope, relevant to considering 'how arts interventions can help to reach the marginalised and excluded child', to quote the blurb on the back cover.  It certainly remains a watershed in my own writing and thinking about what actually happens when artists work with young people and their teachers.  Researching it was a pleasure - it is a rare commission that encourages you to take such a personal approach to documentation or evaluation.  Luckily, Simon Richey, who recently retired as Assistant Director (Education) at the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, was always keen to try new approaches and to take risks in his groundbreaking programmes, whether that was pioneering arts work in Pupil Referral Units (PRUs) or researching what a 'human-scale school' might look like.  That sense of adventure was tempered with strategy, too - in the case of the PRU 'first-time projects', he commissioned not one but three publications, so that readers could have, for once, a rounded picture of an arts programme.

 

Mine was the first to emerge, an impressionistic account of a dozen visits made to arts projects in PRUs and Learning Support Units around the country, in which I tried to capture the actuality of the experiences that each centre was going through.  Not long afterwards, the National Foundation for Educational Research produced its own report, Serious Play, which pursued a more rigorous approach, drawing out some harder evidence of the impact of the Gulbenkian's programme, which was partnered by the Arts Council.  It was interesting to see how both reports came, by their different routes, to similar conclusions.   Doncaster Community Arts (darts) was then funded to produce The Art of Engagement, a very useful guide to setting up and running arts projects in PRUs - copies can still be obtained from them at www.thepoint.org.uk/publications.  This series of reports came full circle with Simon's commissioning of Everything Stopped, a remarkable documentary about a dance project with a PRU and an arts venue in Barnet.  In the liner notes I wrote for the DVD version, I commented that this film offered 'a privileged insight into one unique project and the chemistry that made it possible'.  In a more modest way, of course, that was what I had tried to do for the projects visited in Creating Chances.

 

For information about the Gulbenkian Foundation's activities and publications, visit www.gulbenkian.org.uk.  Thanks are due to the Foundation for supplying this publication in colour with all the wonderful pictures that the gifted photographer Adrian Fisk made for us.
 
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Creating Chances.pdf (704 KB)
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Conference reports

 From time to time, I get asked to produce succinct reports about seminars conferences - not as a traditional 'record of proceedings' but as a way of drawing out the most important issues that were raised on the day (or days) and looking forward to what might happen next.  That way, delegates have more than scribbled notes to refer back to and those who couldn't attend but would have liked to can get more than a flavour of what the conference was about.  I am currently preparing to promote this as a bespoke service to the arts, education and other sectors - offering conference organisers a simple all-in package (covering editorial, design and print) that will make it easy for them to build on and exploit the considerable investment they have made in staging such events.

One such report - to mark the annual meeting of the Conference of Drama Schools (CDS) in 2008 - is downloadable here.  This organisation had planned a wide-ranging debate about the future of the sector and decided it wanted more than its usual summary report - something that could be sent out to other agencies in the field of theatre and education as well as to its members.  The six-page report (printed three A4 pages a side and then folded) was a neat solution - serving CDS members and showing others that this organisation was the kind that thinks ahead.  For more information about the work of CDS, you can visit www.drama.ac.uk.

 

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CDS conference report.pdf (208 KB)
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Writing is Primary

Before going independent and multidisciplinary two decades ago, I spent several years in the arts funding system as a literature officer, amongst other things, and a large part of my job was to support writers and storytellers going into schools to do readings and run writing workshops.  Earlier even than that, I gained my PGCE partly through writing and introducing a slim volume of poetry 'for use in the sixth form' - those were the days when teaching practice was a short and (for me at least) slightly surrealistic blip in a blissful year of reading and discussing what teaching English and drama might consist of.  I brought this personal experience to a fascinating piece of research that the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation commissioned me to undertake in 2005: to review the state of play in the teaching and learning of writing in primary schools.  The findings from this survey bore out a general feeling in and out of education that there were specific problems, most obviously with boys failing to achieve expected standards.  More broadly, the pedagogic emphasis seemed to be more on teaching the 'secretarial aspects' of writing (capital letters, punctuation et al) than on the content, style, purpose and readership of children's writing.  One less obvious consequence was the limit this approach placed on the creative potential of the teacher herself/himself.

This confirmation of a need for fresh thinking ultimately led to an ambitious year-long action research project, Writing is Primary, involving three clusters of schools in Bury, Worcester and Medway/Kent in 2007/08.  My report on this project, published by the Foundation in 2009, draws out what was learned from these schools as they tried, in different ways, to improve the teaching and learning of writing.  One fascinating outcome bore out my own original hunch - that teachers who take the risk of writing themselves (and do so in class in front of their children) frequently report a marked improvement in their pupils' own attitudes to writing, in their confidence and thus in the quality of their writing. 

The report can be downloaded here  or, if you want a beautifully designed print version, single copies may still be available free from Education Direct - simply email esmeefairbairnfoundation@education.co.uk stating your request, your name (and, if applicable, your organisation's name) and full address, plus email address and phone number in case of queries.  You can also find out more about the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation by visiting www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk.

 

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Writing is primary.pdf (491 KB)
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Youth Peer to Peer

Youth Peer to Peer was commissioned as one of four case studies looking at models of engagement in education, published as a pack by Creative Partnerships London North as virtually its last act before the national restructure of the whole CP programme.  My brief was to look at how one particular school addressed 'youth voice' - and at how young people might work together as a supportive learning community.  The project lent itself to easy metaphors, as it involved aerial artists and young people 'learning to fly', but the difficult issues that were raised about achieving a genuinely equal dialogue between adults in power and young students took the study beyond such platitudes.  There are packs still around, apparently, but you can download my case study here or the whole range from http://www.anewdirection.org.uk/.  A New Direction now runs Creative Partnerships and a number of other programmes in London aimed at developing creative approaches to teaching and learning, building young people's aspirations and connecting them to the city and the opportunities it offers.

 

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Youth Peer to Peer.pdf (165 KB)
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Arts and young people at risk

As an independent consultant working to commission, my involvement in actual policy making is at most tangential and my influence on practice, if any, is hard to quantify though I naturally hope that what I write will make some kind of difference.  A lot of my work over recent years has been documenting and evaluating arts interventions with young people at risk in some way - perhaps excluded from school or on the way to or from custody - and in 2005/06 I had the opportunity to work with Arts Council England on a policy document on the arts and young people at risk of (re)offending.  Nikki Crane, then the Head of Social Inclusion at ACE, was the driving force behind the strategy, which arose from the partnership she had forged with the Youth Justice Board, and we canvassed opinion across the arts and criminal justice sector in creating the text which you can download here.  The practical result of the publication was a three-year national programme of funded arts work with young offenders and those at risk.  The sequel publication was to have been a collection of case studies about the work but by the time I had cleared the decks to write it, the moment had passed and the Social Inclusion Unit at the Arts Council had vanished.  However, I still have tapescripts of my interviews with artists and arts organisations working in the field and with the criminal justice professionals involved, which I hope one day will see the light of day in some useful form.

 

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Arts and young people at risk.pdf (336 KB)
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Call it a tenner!

Call it a tenner is quite a long document to download, so I have put up just the introductory section here.  If you are interested in all aspects of pricing in the arts and/or in seeing the rest of the publication, you can download the whole thing in 5 sections from the Arts Council England website at www.artscouncil.org.uk (click and search on Publications) or, a more readable option, you can buy a copy of the printed book for - you guessed it - a tenner, assuming they have not sold out.  Copies can be ordered from Marston Book Services - call 01235 465500 or email direct.orders@marston.co.uk - the ISBN is 978-0-7287-1340-6 and it is a handsome and well-designed volume.  Failing that, I can forward pdfs myself if you email me at richardings@blueyonder.co.uk.

I am not sure what impact the credit crunch has had on thinking since this book was published but I suspect the principles explored herein still apply.  The commission to edit and contribute to this publication came out of the Arts Council's desire to examine how performing and visual arts venues, having been encouraged to develop new audiences, could now grasp the nettle of setting prices more confidently and creatively.  At the time, this was the first and only book on this topic, which proved an unexpectedly fascinating one as I delved deeper into it in the company of my far more knowledgeable fellow contributors.



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Call it a tenner 1.pdf (428 KB)
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