Co-creating with Artsmark schools and partner organisations

8 November 2022

In my seven years of working with Artsmark schools and partners, I’ve had many enquiries about exemplars and what’s worked well in other settings. I asked myself, are there any successful models I can point to – particularly those that address the Artsmark Framework criteria?

It’s been a challenging couple years for both the education and arts sectors, with collaborations sometimes being put on hold and leaving partners feeling lost and inert. Although A New Direction has the resources to help, we thought it would be even better to bring together a cohort of Artsmark schools and partners to pilot an approach that would explore activities together and share expertise. We’ve called it the Artsmark Co-Creation Programme.

The Artsmark Co-Creation Programme asked participating schools and organisations to co-create an activity to address the Children and Young People criterion of the Artsmark Framework, which would feed into a new resource for other schools to use and adapt. For the pilot programme, we worked with two primary schools in Greenwich: Fossdene Primary School and Invicta Primary School, a secondary school in Sutton called Overton Grange, and Riverside, a special school in Haringey. They were partnered respectively with Eastside Arts, Space Studios, Creative Youth, and Open City, and matched according to their initial expressions of interest and areas of expertise.

The programme consists of four interactive sessions on Zoom focused on partnership building, a co-creation workshop, a peer review session, as well as a final reflection and evaluation session after delivering their co-created activities. Using the metaphor of nurturing an orchard tree, partners exchanged thoughts about their existing strengths in each setting and how these could be grown, with an emphasis on the role of young people in influencing and delivering change. We found Miro to be a useful tool for creative and collaborative online working.

Further sessions gave time for the partners to complete an in-depth planning template, which encouraged them to think beyond the logistics of their activity by incorporating the seven P's:

Purpose, practicalities, participants, products, process, principles, perception.

Check out our new Engaging and Empowering Children and Young People resource to learn more about each of the partners’ models and approach to addressing the Children and Young People Artsmark criterion. We encourage teachers to use and adapt these models to within their own settings:

• Encouraging classroom cohesion through the creation of a zine
• Exploring and interpreting written text through dance
• A road map for establishing a student arts council
• A skate-park design project with local site visits and consultation with local authority services

One of the greater challenges we witnessed during the programme was the difficulty in separating the content of the activity (and all the associated momentum and enthusiasm!) from the need to explicitly address how their activity demonstrates the fulfilment of the Children and Young People Engagement criterion and evidence it. In this respect, more guidance will be useful for future iterations of the Co-Creation programme.

In our final reflection and evaluation session, we reflected on some of the tools we used to build partnerships and co-create, including the Grow Your Orchard activity, and how these helped us to document the student responses to the activities. The partners used the tree as a metaphor for their activity and partnership, asking themselves if the children were hugging the tree or hiding behind it, for example:

“Some [children] took the project into their own hands, using their ideas and initiatives. You could see the intricacies in their work. They amplified their own voice, and were able to talk about what they did and why.” – Anne, Primary Teacher from Fossdene, and Lydia, Artist from Eastside.

Kirsty from Overton Grange was ‘genuinely shocked’ at the students’ enthusiasm: “They have a shared language that we’re not always party to.” She admitted that she had found engaging with the co-creation process difficult, at first but by the end of the programme, “I felt I’d got what I needed and it gave me a confidence a boost because I saw what I had to contribute.” Overton Grange’s Student Arts Council continues to reach out to peers and engage many more students in the arts than before.

For Ryan from Riverside and Sarah from Open City, they found real meaning and authenticity through the co-creation process. The activity was based in the school’s borough and it gave the students the opportunity to talk directly to local authority planners: “They were articulate, they showcased their talents, and their attention spans grew.”

During the reflection and evaluation session, there was a universal agreement from all the partners that they had all invested more time in their activities than they had originally planned. The programme specified the delivery period, but the number and length of session was decided upon by each of the partners. By good fortune, there was a lot of good will on all side that led to extension activities such as Fossdene Primary visiting Ravensbourne University to create RISO prints, active involvement of Overton Grange’s Student Arts Council in planning and curating the school’s 25^th anniversary, and ongoing discussions with local developers and borough services about giving more public space to showcase students’ work. Of course, we know that schools don’t always have access to partner support, which is why our new resource offers alternative approaches that could be adapted to any setting and confidently delivered by any teacher within their own classroom.

For the second iteration of the Artsmark Co-Creation Programme, we are working with three new partnerships to co-create new activities and approaches to the Equality, Diversity, and Inclusion criterion. Initial ideas from the partners include looking at diversity in opera, exploring identities in Shakespeare’s text, and creating accessible multi-sensory experiences for SEND students.

At A New Direction, our Artsmark team has learned a lot from this pilot programme. If you are considering your own co-creation project, here are a few tips we can share:

• Make real connections with the world beyond your walls – Cultural Collaborations is another of the Artsmark criteria, of course!
• It’s easy to get carried away with the fun of the activity, but stay focused on the criteria: what are they really asking you to show?
• Keep in mind the need to demonstrate evidence of impact and build this into the planning

If you have any questions about the Artsmark Co-Creation programme, connecting with Artsmark Partners, or would like advice around the wider Artsmark Programme, please don’t hesitate to email the Artsmark Team at artsmark@anewdirection.org.uk.