Enriching Education through arts, music and literature

The My Primary School is at the Museum pilots have clearly shown that school-museum relationships are successful methods for boosting pupil’s academic attainment, but also for fostering their creativity and exposing them to local culture. Two organisations here in the UK are achieving just that through the medium of art, music, and literature.

Children and Arts (https://www.childrenandarts.org.uk/) is one of those organisations, and they work with communities whose children are in danger of missing out on creative and cultural experiences. Their vision is to see an inclusive and accessible arts sector which ultimately results in healthier and happier children, and they’re doing this through connecting children with the culture right on their doorstep!

The Great Art Quest is one of their initiatives, working UK-wide to connect schoolchildren to their local galleries, and helping them to learn about, experience, and create art with the hope of changing the way the children think about the world. The Quests bring children along on year-long cultural journeys, giving them an exciting wealth of opportunities to explore their own creativity through both gallery visits and workshops with local artists. The workshops and gallery visits lead to chances for the children to see their own work exhibited in the gallery they’ve been working with.

The programme targets schools which are socially, economically, or rurally deprived, and teachers have passionately testified to the positive effects the Quests have on their pupils This has included increased confidence, improved grades, and a renewed interest in the arts – to name just a few benefits. The programme also hopes to inspire pupils to go out and discover more of their local culture in their own time with their families.

Whilst The Great Art Quest is ongoing, Children and the Arts have previously held similar initiatives which centre on opera and poetry. OperaQuest took place from 2014-2017, and in 2016/17 alone eight primary schools and two arts venues were worked with – the Birmingham Hippodrome and Opera North, Leeds. Around 1,500 children were engaged in the Quests across the whole four years, and the initiative saw them visiting a professional live opera performance and then getting to workshop their very own opera. This helped them to build up some brand new skills and to gain an improved understanding of music, as well as – like in the Art Quests - changing the way they see the world and the way they think about opera.

Along the same lines is PoetryQuest, which gave 17,500 children the chance to get involved with local performance poetry. This programme ran for six years and, during it, children visited local arts venues to watch a contemporary performance poetry piece and then wrote their own poetry to perform at the arts venue they’d worked with.

Another organisation working with schoolchildren who might not otherwise get much exposure to the arts is First Story (https://www.firststory.org.uk/), who run the Schools and Writers initiative. First Story work to match published writers up with a school or class, which they visit once a week over a six-week period to deliver writing workshops. The workshops cover a whole host of different types of creative writing, such as poetry, fiction, and scripts, and they also look at improving the children’s speaking and listening skills.

First story mainly hope to encourage creative writing amongst children, but a great secondary outcome is that they’re able to provide a stable income for published writers. In 2016-17, the initiative was up and running in over 70 UK schools, and all teachers who have been involved report that children’s writing improves thanks to the residencies - with an incredible three-quarters of children seeing this improvement in themselves. And that’s not all, as teachers have also reported improved levels of creativity and raised aspirations in the children, along with boosted communication skills and raised confidence and resilience.