Connected London: Building a Cultural Education Roadmap for London

8 December 2014

Connected London is about organisations collaborating differently locally to provide excellent cultural education opportunities to all young people. A New Direction has been working on a number of different programmes over the last two years, developing and exploring ways of addressing the challenge of sustaining and growing activity in this area at a time of diminishing public sector resources.

On October 27th at the Goldsmith’s Centre we brought people from the cultural sector together to share our learning from Connected and talk about how we could move this agenda forward and ensure all parts of London, and all children and young people, can benefit.

David Lammy, MP and prospective Mayoral candidate, gave the keynote speech. He talked about how easy it is for some people to lead isolated and parochial lives in the midst of such a great cultural city and that this poses a threat to social cohesion. He also talked about the part access to music had played in his life and the importance of engaging all communities in the creative industries. He stressed that we still have a long way to go to in building genuine cultural opportunity for all.

A panel made up of leaders from the youth, schools, culture and local government spheres spoke on a panel to discuss – whose responsibility it is to provide excellent cultural education?

We were also joined by Jonna Forsman from Kuopio in Finland who provided real inspiration and a model of integrated and in-depth cultural education that runs through the whole of Kuopio. Here learning takes place in arts venue and arts takes place in schools, all art-forms have equal value and are seen as key to well-being. The cultural education programme is a core part of education.

In the afternoon delegates worked on the Connected London models from London and discussed how to build sustained cultural education partnerships across the city.

Join the Connected London network

This learning will be developed and explored through the Connected network and we are looking for anyone with an interest in local cultural education – or creative learning – partnerships to join…

Email us if you want to join the network.

Below some highlights from the event. We hope they are useful for you.