Adam Coleman highlights his work with Children Looked After, as part of the Cultural Pathfinder programme.
In 2005 the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames was one of 13 local authorities selected by the DCMS and the Local Government Association to take part in the Cultural Pathfinder programme, a two-year pilot programme aimed to highlight innovation, learning and transferability in using cultural services to address the seven shared priority areas. The programme provided a focus for innovation and experimentation with the aim of strengthening the practice and recognition of cultures contribution to meeting community needs and driving service improvements.
Culture 4 Keeps
Our project, Culture 4 Keeps, focused on utilising cultural services as a driving force to improve the attainment of Children Looked After (CLA) e.g. those who are in the public care of local authorities. In line with the Enjoy and Achieve strand of Every Child Matters our project sought to develop a universal offer of engagement with cultural services for this group of vulnerable young people and their carers. We aimed to do this by encouraging participation by this group in our existing programme of cultural activity through an ongoing programme of one-to-one interactions between the young people and their key support workers. To enable us to monitor progress we gave each young person a Culture 4 Keeps card, which provided them with free or subsidised access to cultural facilities, and subsequently measured improvements in usage.
Over the past eight years, we have developed a nationally-recognised programme of work for young people at risk of exclusion from formal education, and we have developed a substantial programme of direct service provision through our programme of exhibitions, events and educational projects. From this position we were able to significantly drive initial stages of project development and draw upon our wealth of experience of developing programmes for vulnerable groups. One of the key lessons learnt early on in the project was the need to develop additional project-based provision targeted specifically toward this group of young people, and the Arts Service was quick to respond to this need by developing a series of projects proposals.
What We Say Matters
One such project was What We Say Matters, which was an animated film project for children and young people led by artist Will Bishop-Stevens. What We Say Matters provided CLA with a voice to interpret the Every Child Matters outcomes in relation to their own lives through the creation of short film. Another project, Street Art, involved CLA working with artists to create a dramatic collaborative street artwork based upon the view from Richmond Hill. This project culminated with a public exhibition at Orleans House Gallery in Richmond. Building upon lessons learnt we made gradual, ongoing changes to the delivery of our services with a goal of involving even more young people in our programme and retaining those already involved for a sustained period of time.
As the programme began to draw to a close the Arts Service felt it was important to provide a focal point for the outcomes of this project, and to consolidate lessons learnt with a project led by the young people themselves. The resulting project, Culture Vultures, was developed by the Arts Service on behalf of all project partners and involved CLA with their nominated friends and foster family members, exploring themes of culture and leisure through photography. The project united cultural services, as well as other cultural providers and organisations from the wider voluntary and commercial sector, into one joint celebration, testing how working together can be managed, linking all the sites with the exhibition and raising awareness of the project to the general public and the sector.
Lessons learnt
So what have we learnt? Throughout the course of this programme we have encountered many challenges all of which have offered valuable lessons in how we deliver our services for this vulnerable group of young people. From the outset, it was crucial that we built open and reliable relations with our key partners. The need to establish and maintain individual interaction with young people has also been a key factor in our success, enabling them to develop skills and build confidence in accessing and using cultural services. Many of the young people felt threatened by the sheer weight of attention placed upon them, and we soon realised there was a need to sensitively integrate them into a wider group or into a bigger project. We discovered during the course of the project that there was a need to provide clearer progression routes for the young people to enable them to move from one form of cultural engagement to another and to encourage engagement across all cultural services. We identified at a later stage in the project that there existed a serious need to reinforce outcomes of the project with the young people and with their crucial network of support to ensure that the benefits gained from engagement in cultural activity became embedded in their family lifestyle and that confidence in culture was built. Finally, for the Arts Service, this project further demonstrated the need to ensure that cultural engagement of any form with any young person should be about the quality of the experience.
These lessons proved a reminder to us all of how we must accommodate and adapt the delivery of our services for the varying needs of our customers particularly when dealing with vulnerable groups of people. The aim of our project had always been to embed culture within the lifestyle of these young people, to influence their choices and decisions in life and make a long-term impact upon the well-being of them and their families. Whilst it is, of course, an impossible task to measure the enduring impact of our project at this early stage, we feel that the impact upon individual persons has been significant and we have witnessed significant changes in the young people involved. n
Adam Coleman is Arts Co-ordinator for the London Borough of Richmond upon Thames.
w: http://www.idea-knowledge.gov.uk
In 2003, the Government published a Green Paper called Every Child Matters, which focused on key themes, such as increasing the support for families, ensuring intervention takes place before children reach crisis point, and ensuring that people working with children are trained and valued. Following consultation, the Government published Every Child Matters: the Next Steps, and passed the Children Act 2004, providing the legislative spine for developing more effective services focused around the needs of children and families. Every Child Matters: Change for Children was published in November 2004 and comprises a new approach to the well-being of young people from birth to age 19. The Governments aim is for every child to have the support they need to be healthy, stay safe, enjoy and achieve, make a positive contribution and achieve economic well-being.
This means that the organisations involved with providing services to children from hospitals and schools, to police and voluntary groups will be sharing information and working together, to protect children and help them achieve what they want in life. Over the next few years, every local authority will be working with its partners, through childrens trusts, to find out what works best for children and young people in its area and act on it. They will need to involve children and young people in this process, and when inspectors assess how local areas are doing, they will listen especially to the views of children and young people themselves.