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One of the most hotly debated cultural topics over the past five years has been the place of the arts in formal education. The warnings of the cultural sector, that curriculum changes and the EBacc (a selection of GCSE subjects that excludes the arts) would impact on the take-up of these subjects, are being proved correct. There has been a 21% drop in arts GCSEs taken in 2016, compared with 2010. And the decision last month to scrap A-level art history is just the latest example of a worrying political message: that in terms of education, art doesn’t count.
My own education could not have been more distanced from this perspective. Aged 11, I left home to enrol at the Royal Ballet School, based at White Lodge in Richmond, London. My education took place not only in a historic royal palace, but also under the umbrella of one of Britain’s great cultural institutions.
Culture and the arts were integral to my entire education – we didn’t go so far as to dance our maths lessons, but I was immersed in an environment where art wasn’t considered a soft option for children thought to be “less academic”. Art was assumed to be relevant to the entire curriculum, central to an education that equipped me with crucial life skills: curiosity, initiative, creativity, perseverance, self-criticism, open-mindedness, self-confidence, courage and responsibility. As a dancer, these kind of transferable skills are essential: a dancer’s career rarely extends beyond 40.
With this background, I was intrigued by a recent project based at King’s College London, where I now work, to explore the impact of siting primary and nursery schools in museums – going beyond the usual day trips to embed lessons in these institutions over an extended period of up to a term.
The project, the results of which have just been published, clearly showed that the benefits of integrating art and learning that I so enjoyed were shared by participating children in Swansea, South Shields and Liverpool. Their confidence, creativity, and social and communication skills were all enhanced – and teachers reported that the pupils retained more of what they learned.
But the benefits weren’t restricted to the children. Teachers gained confidence in using a wide range of resources in creative ways to deliver the core curriculum, and the schools felt it brought them closer to parents, helping promote community cohesion.
This all comes at a tough time for museums. There has been a 17% reduction in local authority cultural spending since 2010, with more than 40 local museums already closed. The north of England has been disproportionately hit. In Kirklees, West Yorkshire, the council announced last month that it will close three museums, hard on the heels of five closures in Lancashire. Just down the road from the King’s College project in South Shields, Bede’s World – a celebration of Anglo-Saxon Northumberland and the venerable Bede – closed in February due to government cuts. Thankfully in this case the museum has been saved by a charity.
Imaginative partnerships could help stretched funds go further. Might museums be designed with school education in mind? Or might a new school, fit for future generations, include a museum within its boundaries? It’s tempting to assume pupils would be the beneficiaries of this kind of partnership, but it could be just as significant for the museums. By helping pupils develop cultural engagement from an early age, museums could secure them as visitors in the future.
Free museum admission – introduced by Labour and retained by the Conservatives – remains a popular policy, but there is work to do to increase the social, cultural and economic diversity of visitors. Almost 90% of those who go to Britain’s flagship museums are from higher social classes. Co-location of schools and museums could help create the culturally confident citizens of tomorrow, and ensure local museums are a vital resource for all members of their communities. Education and the arts are moving further apart, but it need not be like this.
By Deborah Bull
21 November 2016
https://www.theguardian.com/commentisfree/2016/nov/21/local-school-museum-classes-pupils-teachers
