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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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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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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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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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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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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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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From the favela to our manor

I was commissioned by People's Palace Projects to write a report on the first major visit to the UK by AfroReggae, a cultural organisation from Brazil that has now developed an ongoing creative relationship with venues, artists and arts workers here.  From the favela to our manor is subtitled Translating AfroReggae and that is what I attempted to do - to pick out the implications of an international intervention in arts work and, specifically, to examine the impact of this company's work with young people at risk in the inner city in London and Manchester.  Prior to its visit, I was lucky enough to be able to meet AfroReggae on its own territory - the favelas of Rio de Janeiro - though that 'territory', of course is notoriously contested by murderous rival drug factions.  That is where my narrative begins.  It ends with this prophetic remark from percussionist Altair Martins, setting the agenda for what is now taking place:

To reach a hundred young people, you start by working with two and they will carry on the work for you.  I didn’t know any of you before I got here but I tried to bring you the energy that I have.  And the energy I gave you, you multiplied it and passed it back to me.  Each of us can pass these ideas on to two other people; those two people to four others; those four to eight more - and it will never stop.  This energy has to be multiplied.

For the latest on AfroReggae's work, including touring, get Google to translate its home site at www.afroreggae.org.br - and catch up with its partnership work here at www.favelatotheworld.org.  For more information on the work of People's Palace Projects, visit www.peoplespalace.org.uk and www.amazonia-london.com.

  

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Conversations with an elephant

One of the most memorable London cultural events of the 21st century so far has to be The Sultan's Elephant.  Created and performed by French company Royal de Luxe, this public extravaganza took the capital almost completely by surprise over the first weekend in May 2006.  The arrival of a twenty-foot high little girl from outer space and a elephant parading through the heart of the old Empire changed many people's perceptions of what art and theatre and spectacle might mean, including it seems Arts Council England's.  Some initial reactions from the professional arts world were aired the following Monday at a conference convened by LIFT (London International Festival of Theatre), which had supported Artichoke Production's risky proposal to put on the show in the first place.  I was commissioned to write up the conference and my report is downloadable here.  It covers the impact of the weekend's events as well as the conference discussions - and it is unashamedly personal in tone.  This was one arts project I will never forget, along I suspect with the thousands of others who witnessed it.  Artichoke continues to promote the unexpected and its more recent activities can be seen at www.artichoke.uk.com/ and LIFT, too, continues to break new ground, as a visit to www.liftfestival.com will demonstrate.

 

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The Inventive Answer

It is not often you have carte-blanche to write about creativity, but I was commissioned a couple of years back by Rick Hall to write a 'think piece' on the conditions for creativity for young people.  The Inventive Answer was my response.  It can be downloaded here but its other natural home is at Ignite!, an organisation which my piece played a modest part in kickstarting, and which is now breaking ever more exciting new ground in exploring the creative potential of what used to be called 'yoof'.  If you want to learn more about Ignite's work, visit www.ignitefutures.org.uk.



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