Sounding Board
This week sees the launch of a major provocation paper examining the place of education and learning in our national
and regional performing arts and cultural organisations, published by Mission, Models, Money. Its authors, Sara
Robinson and Teo Greenstreet, argue that arts organisations’ failure to integrate education work with their core
artistic programmes is preventing them from stimulating wider public engagement with the arts.
Mission Unaccomplished
Sara Robinson and
Teo Greenstreet
Clore Fellows 2004/05
he fact that producers and presenters choose to
T make clear distinctions between those events
and activities that sit under the ‘education’
banner and those that don’t, raises some fundamental
questions about art and its audiences. Do some of us
need educating more than others? Are our core or
main stage programmes devoid of educational value?
Is it beneficial to separate art from learning? And is
this separation merely an issue of language and
terminology, or is there a cultural hierarchy creating
the distinction? When the trustees and senior
executives at some of our national performing arts
and cultural organisations (the ‘top ten’ of which
receive almost 50% of Arts Council England’s revenue
funding budget) express ambivalence and confusion
about how educational activity relates to the core
purpose of their organisations, it is, perhaps, no
surprise that questions such as these are seldom
addressed.
Education sidelined
The current status of arts education in our cultural
institutions provides clues as to the value they place
on this type of work. The UK boasts a wide and
growing range of arts education work, much of it
considered to be of an exceptionally high standard,
and we are seen as being a world leader1. Yet despite
such accolades, education work often remains
sidelined from core artistic activity and unrelated to
core objectives. Definitions and terminology are
confused, mechanisms for sharing best practice are
limited, and there are no standard or robust evaluation
methodologies for making the case for arts education.
Advocacy for education amongst trustees and senior
executives is very limited, not least because it is often
seen as having emerged as a result of funding
imperatives rather than mission. Arts education
positions, both freelance and salaried, are typified by
long hours and low pay, and compared with the sums
spent on our core and main stage work, the
percentage of total arts spend allocated to education
– from both public and private sources – is miniscule.
Towards public engagement
In stark contrast with this bleak picture, we are hearing
more and more about the desire to increase relevance
and engagement with a much wider public. The need
for arts and cultural organisations to reinvent
themselves in order to gain wider public relevance in
return for the current levels of public funding has also
become a core political theme, and Culture Minister
David Lammy has articulated deep government
dissatisfaction with the pace of progress in this area.
The irony is that neither policy-makers, cultural
professionals nor cultural commentators seem to have
editors@artsprofessional.co.uk
Mission, Models, Money
grasped the notion that arts education – the core
purpose of which relates to learning and engagement
– could be the key to delivering the public support
that they are seeking. But first, the concept of arts
education has to move on from the classic one-way
street where organisations deliver their choice of arts
and culture to audiences. If an organisation has
learning and engagement at the heart of its mission,
then the potential for listening to the public, to find
out how they want to be engaged, and with what,
must also be explored.
Learning and engagement at the core
What, then, might be the impact if arts and cultural
organisations made a commitment to embed learning
and engagement into their mainstream practice?
Trustees and executives would revisit their vision,
mission, artistic policy and programme and start
asking themselves some difficult questions: Who do
we want to be engaged, and in what ways? Does our
artistic programme need to change? What activities
can we offer to encourage people to get more deeply
involved and to attend more often? How might these
activities work alongside the artistic programme so
that people make clear links between their own
involvement and what is on stage?
The organisation’s programme would be viewed as a
single entity with different strands, including a
significantly enhanced and more diverse learning and
engagement component, which would be integrated
with other artistic work to create a perpetual circle
with one feeding off the other.
Tensions between the learning team and the
programming team would be resolved in the context
of overall strategy, and artistic directors would have a
clearer responsibility for developing learning and
engagement.
Organisations would invest in expertise to develop
the most effective methods of learning and
engagement – technology, and other contemporary
methods of engagement would sit alongside
traditional forms such as workshops and schools
matinees – and would value and reward the skill it
takes to run learning programmes and projects.
Tensions between the ‘art’ and the ‘education’ budgets
would be relieved because the two would be
inextricably linked in delivering overall objectives.
Funders would be encouraged to invest holistically in
an entire creative project or programme.
Staffing structures would be re-modelled to include
key education staff at strategic levels in organisations
– with pay-scales to match.
Audiences who wish to, would be enabled to
participate actively in the arts as much as consume
them.
Best practice
Anyone in doubt that such claims can justifiably be
made for the integration of education work into the
core of arts organisations should take inspiration from
Photo: Dan Brady
Participation: a central focus for The Sage Gateshead
the few dynamic and widely respected organisations
that have proved that it is possible to reinvigorate the
way they cultivate relationships between art, artists
and audiences by placing learning and engagement at
the core of what they do. The Sage Gateshead and the
London International Festival of Theatre, for example,
have done just this, and are able to demonstrate
engagement with a wide range of people without
compromising the quality of their artistic
programmes. Indeed, both organisations would argue
that an ethos of learning at the heart of what they do
enhances their ability to operate creatively.
Surely now the time is right to dispense with the
outmoded idea that education is a philanthropic,
tokenistic activity designed to appease funders or tick
the ‘minority’ box. Art and education are inextricably
linked: one fuels the other because art without
engagement is surely meaningless. By viewing
education as the process of engaging people with the
art we (and they) create, and by making it core to
mission, arts organisations will give themselves the
best possible chance of reaching the holy grail of
wider public involvement with the arts. n
Sara Robinson is a freelance arts consultant and
projects director. She was a Clore Leadership
Fellow 2004/05.
e: sara_robinson@btopenworld.com
Teo Greenstreet is Chief Executive of The Media
Centre, and also a Clore Fellow 2004/05.
e: teo.greenstreet@mcnetwork.co.uk
The provocation paper ‘Mission
Unaccomplished: the place of education and
learning in our national and regional performing
arts and cultural organisations’ is available
online at www.missionmodelsmoney.org.uk
1
Owens, P. (1998) Creative Tensions, a discussion document on arts
organisations and education, British American Arts Association
ArtsProfessional 6 November 2006 9