The government yesterday re-confirmed funding and roll-out plans for Arts Council England’s Creative Partnerships scheme, beyond its two-year pilot.
The £70 million plan will extend the scheme to schools in 20 further regions around the country.
Placing arts professional in schools to help enhance students’ creative skills, the initiative was originally awarded £40 million through Arts Council England, to run a two-year pilot programme from April 2003 until March 2004. Further funds were announced by the government last year, to roll-out the initiative beyond 2004.
The pilot programme involved 361 schools in 16 regions around England.
The new Creative Partnership Areas announced yesterday will be introduced in two phases: Phase two will begin in December 2003, with activity in schools taking place during September 2004; and Phase 3 will commence in April 2004, culminating in school events during September 2005.
Unveiling the plans at a conference at the Barbican yesterday, Education Secretary Charles Clarke reiterated the importance of creativity to young people’s education.
‘Creativity isn’t an add on,’ he said. ‘It must form a vital and integral part of every child’s experience of school. Research has shown that, if it does, it can contribute to improved learning and increased standards across the school as a whole.’
Meanwhile, in a joint statement from Culture Secretary Tessa Jowell and Clarke, Jowell emphasised the increasingly important role that cultural sectors must play in education. ‘We have an enormously rich cultural life in this country, and school must be a window to this world,’ she commented. ‘Our cultural organisations have a responsibility to work with schools to place young people and education at the heart of everything they do.’
‘The government wants to see young people from all backgrounds have the chance to use their creativity and imagination in a positive way,’ Jowell continued. ‘Creative Partnerships are the means by which we will make this happen. Today’s commitment – to extend the initiative further – means that it will be operating in the majority of the neighbourhood renewal areas by 2006.’
Arts Council Chairman Gerry Robinson said the Creative Partnerships scheme is ‘a hugely important part’ of Arts Council England’s commitment to creativity and learning in schools.
‘Twice as many young people and teachers will have the opportunity to work with excellent cultural and creative organisations. We are delighted to be able to double the size of the project, and look forward to Creative Partnerships benefiting every region in the country.’
Education Secretary Charles Clarke and School Standard Minister David Miliband might continue to emphasise that creativity shouldn’t just be an ‘add on’ to education, but industry figures behind a campaign to integrate creativity more broadly across the education curriculum have warned that this commitment needs to move beyond initiatives like Creative Partnerships.
Victoria Todd, Director of the National Campaign for the Arts (NCA), recently welcomed comments by Miliband – also reflected in Clarke’s speech yesterday – at an NCA Creativity in Education conference, but said that the challenge is to ensure this is not just government rhetoric and that broader plans are actually implemented.
Todd said that while initiatives like Creative Partnerships are often flagged as examples of the government’s commitment to more creative approaches to education, she believes a lot more needs to be done, particularly, in getting all Local Education Authorities involved in the creativity agenda.
‘You’ve got to get to every local authority in the country, and you’ve got to get to the teaching of teachers, and get it right. So the Local Authorities have to got come on board, [and recognise] that arts is absolutely one of the most important curriculum subjects, and that the teachers are properly trained to deliver the arts,’ she told Arts Hub recently.
Last month, a number of high profile musicians, including Evelyn Glennie, Sir James Galway, Michael Kamen and Julian Lloyd Webber, met Education Secretary, Charles Clarke, to urge the government to improve standards of music tuition in schools.
In more recent developments, The Paul Hamlyn Foundation has announced that it is undertaking a three-year study of music provision both within and outside formal education in England. Through its Musical Futures initiative, it aims to pilot and propose new models of working, in collaboration with Youth Music.
A similar audit of youth music provision in Scotland was published recently. Entitled What’s going on?, the report aimed to identify barriers to young people learning a musical instrument, and found that 50,000-60,000 young people in Scotland take part in music activities each week, but about 100,000 more would participate if given the opportunity.
The Scottish Executive has since allocated £17.5 million to be distributed to local authorities through the Scottish Arts Council, to give every primary school student the chance to take a year of free music lessons.
The new regions to be involved in the Creative Partnerships scheme are:
Phase 2
Basildon, Derby City, Haringey, Waltham Forest, Enfield, North/South Tyneside, Cumbria, Southampton and the Isle of Wight, Plymouth and Coventry, and Bradford
Phase 3
Thurrock, Tendring, Leicester City, Ex-Coalfields Areas (Bolsover, Mansfield and Ashfield), North and SE Northumberland, East Lancashire, Hastings and East Sussex, Stoke on Trent, and Sheffield
CLICK HERE to read an Arts Hub feature on Creative Partnerships, and HERE to access a feature on the NCA’s Creativity in Education campaign.
Find out about the wide range of activities and issues surrounding education and creativity in an archive of articles in Art Hub’s ‘Hot Topic’: Creativity and Education.
