Crossing the border

Posted on 23/07/2024

The Summer number of Forum, whose theme is ‘Changing Times’, is introduced by Patrick Yarker

Returned to power after the General Election, the Labour Party’s watchword is renewal. The incoming government promises a new deal for workers, a new partnership with business, and a re-booting of relationships with Europe.  Less grandiose, but no less necessary, is the commitment to review the current school curriculum and assessment regime.

Will such a review help plot a better course for state education? It may, if it loosens the grip on policy of an economically instrumentalist understanding of education’s purpose. And if its conception of what makes for good teaching is shaped less by data and quantification, and more by valuing the immeasurable.

In 2008 I wrote in Forum about an art-studio based at a primary school in a deprived area of Bristol. Room 13 Hareclive belonged to the international Room 13 network of school-based spaces for making art. Pupils could come to the studio during break or lunchtime, after school and on occasion during lessons. Every young person at the school was recognised as an artist-in-waiting, and the studio as a place where all were enabled to imagine, explore, create, collaborate, reflect and make artwork.

Pretty much everything that projects such as Room 13 stand for has been starved of government endorsement, let alone funding. In the lean years since 2010, even perhaps since 1997, time devoted to making art in primary school has too often and too easily been deemed by officialdom time wasted. Better spend those precious minutes preparing for SATs or consolidating performance in the pseudo-subjects of literacy, numeracy or phonics. As with writing poems or stories, or singing and dancing, or playing musical instruments or performing drama or mime, activities such as drawing, painting, film-making or sculpture took up less and less space in the version of education the state sanctioned for its children. If creative activities couldn’t cash out as higher exam scores, what were they doing on the timetable?

This kind of unthinking meant formal state education abandoned its liberal aspect—the conscious and reflective all-round development of persons—and forgot its dedication to that human flourishing whose horizon is set far wider than the economic.

The Room 13 project at Hareclive E-ACT academy has survived the scorched earth years of Conservative rule principally thanks to the dedication of two adult artists, Shani Ali and Paul Bradley, who have worked at the studio since its inception. With the support of the school they have made it possible for pupils to co-lead the studio and help keep it running for twenty extraordinary years. Thanks to them, Room 13 Hareclive has been a well-spring for imagination, artistic endeavour and play for several generations of young people.

The work of Room 13 Hareclive and equivalent projects has been recognised in the artistic community, but resolutely ignored by education policy-makers. They have framed schoolwork more and more as work to meet the demands of an unknown examiner, whose proxy they require the teacher to be. As a result, in school the here and now and in-itself matters less than the test which is to come and the examination-answer coached, rehearsed, retrieved and submitted to a faceless judgement.

Creative work of any kind resists this dynamic. It remains work for ourselves firstly: unalienated labour. We make art by meeting ourselves in the world and expressing that meeting. Through art we have our own say, and in the way that seems to best suit what we want to say. (This is not quite the same as simply expressing ourselves.) All artistic or creative work awakens an awareness of craft and prompts the exercise of skill towards perfection: the formulation and better realisation of our imagined aims. Once realised, such work is beyond marking, though by no means beyond evaluation. Artists are their own first critics. The work of making art, and reflecting on what is made even as it is made, means young people encounter directly all the questions raised by materials, intentions, audiences, purposes and their own reach. To make art is inter alia to imagine the solution to a technical problem and enact it in practice. An hour in the studio leaves no doubt that, as Michael Armstrong put it, creativity is the high road to skill. Pursuit of the realisation of artistic ends is an encounter with curriculum interwoven with assessment. It insists on its own discipline, to which artists subject themselves with a kind of joy.

I believe Room 13 Hareclive offers young people particularly well-judged access to imaginative creation, a dimension utterly essential to any education worthy the name. For too long the state has singularly failed to recognise, let alone cultivate, this dimension in its schools. And yet, wherever practitioners find means to free the imagination of those they teach, there it is…one step across the border set by official policy (a border increasingly hardened and patrolled) which deems education’s prime purpose and chief end the garnering of qualifications.

A school-based art studio depends for its success on generosity of material provision, and on skilled and knowledgeable practitioners willing to maintain relationships of trust with all young people while free to extend responsibility and agency to them. There are lessons here for the way classrooms could be resourced and teachers afforded scope to work. The Summer number of Forum foregrounds the importance of re-imagining a less straitened and constraining education system. Contributors advocate a curriculum reshaped to address the most pressing challenges of our time, and an assessment system returned to criterion referencing and so made less inequitable. They commend the importance of letting young people speak on their own terms. In pursuit of better policy, they urge the powerful to listen far more to those who do the actual work of teaching. They underscore the benefit of wider inclusion and deeper democracy. And they sketch the forces which will oppose any policy reset undertaken in pursuit of an education which exceeds the production of labour power for capital. Labour Party take note, for just this is the reset we need.