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.
 
Click here to download:
Creating Chances.pdf (704 KB)
(download)