Breaking Barriers: Accessing the Arts

National Portrait Gallery
Wednesday, 8 June 2011

Arts organisations devote a large amount of their resources, staff and time to creating and securing funds for programmes that deliver activities to children and young people through schools.  Projects enhance the school curriculum, broaden horizons and foster personal development for both teachers and pupils.  Most art programmes are delivered free (or at minimal cost) to schools and are designed to be collaborative.  Yet barriers to participation remain. 

A conference hosted by John Lyon’s Charity called Breaking Barriers: Accessing the Arts examined why schools find it difficult to participate fully in programmes.   It provided an opportunity for organisations supported by John Lyon’s Charity to showcase their projects to the wider Arts community to demonstrate the breadth and diversity of activities that the Charity will support. Speakers from Historic Royal Palaces, the British Museum, English National Ballet, Hendon School and others explored ways in which arts organisations could better access young people and how their programmes might better meet their needs. Ways in which arts organisations could share their experiences with colleagues in the art world were also identified in order to maximise the benefits of this learning.

The main highlights from the conference were:

• Undiluted ‘great art’ for children should be promoted

• Inspiration and aspiration: a two-way traffic of ideas and effort between arts organisations and schools, with special emphasis on matching the right project or programme to the right groups of students and their requirements as expressed by enthusiastic teachers.

• Perform Shakespeare don’t read it

• Share resources: collaboration and continuity

• One-off programmes are not as good as sustained interventions

• Working over a long period of time enables schools to embed project ethos into their daily routine

• Contact schools via the school administrator; do this at 3.45pm – school closing and more preoccupied with ‘adult matters’

• Projects go wrong when: needs are not identified early enough; point of contact with schools had not been established;

• Projects go well when teachers are engaged: by holding open weekends and teachers’ forums; involving teachers in project delivery and ensuring that a teachers’ own skills expertise are utilised.  

• Schools must select the right students to participate in projects and the project must be built around those taking part

• Both schools and arts organisations should not limit the expectations they place on the participants

• Arts organisations must be transparent about why they are offering the project and what has prompted that choice.  How do they ensure that it matches what a school requires?

• Project admin must not be arduous: 38hours per week are spent teaching – no time left for organising projects and outings etc.

• Assessing results: schools are judged on exam results – therefore schools are likely to respond most positively to projects that can illustrate how their work will raise attainment of the participants.  Evidence needed to back up these claims.

• Golden rule: the tension between the artistic initiative and the schools’ needs – target enthusiastic teachers within schools and make sure that what is on offer is what teachers want.

• Arts organisations should bring to the project the unique resources that they are able to contribute in terms of utilising professional artists and practitioners that they have access to.

The Charity has produced some guidelines to suggest ways in which Arts organisations and schools can work more effectively together.

To download the guide for Arts organisations, please click here.

To download the guide for schools, please click here.