• Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Facebook
  • Share on Linkedin
  • Share by email

Every young person has the right to enjoy safety at home, in the streets and at school was the message of an arts-led consultation exercise with pupils from 45 schools across Leicestershire this spring. Kevin Ryan talks through the consultation work, the process and some of the outcomes of a project in developing a policy on bullying strategies in schools.

Charnwood Arts is developing a growing reputation for consultation through arts-led projects. For us this process began some years ago as a fire-fighting response by a consortium of statutory and voluntary sector agencies who couldn?t find suitable youth workers willing to take on the work of developing ?a youth voice? within a large city fringe community. We took on this project enthusiastically and at its conclusion, the quality of the engagement with young people and the effectiveness of the outcome both excited and stimulated us to do further work along these lines.

In our latest project, we worked with two age groups ? primary and middle/senior schools ? to create a detailed insight into the whys and wherefores of bullying incidents and to explore suggested responses from young people on how to deal with them. We worked with approximately 100 young people in each group. The project was developed in liaison with Rob Osborn, a former headteacher appointed by Leicestershire County Council as its new co-ordinator of services to address bullying. Rob was very keen to see the development of a closely planned approach which would result in a much wider questionnaire-based initiative. We were all keen that the results of the consultations should actually affect existing services, as well as help develop new services and initiatives in schools. This working partnership with the commissioner was critical to the success of the project and Rob and I spent some time defining the broad framework of the process before taking it into a development phase with the artists involved in its delivery.

Ideas and workshops

As a working group of artists, we first investigated and shared our own knowledge and experiences of bullying. We then engaged in a more detailed process of developing workshop ideas, approaches and the timetabling of the project. We also approached staff and students at Loughborough University Department of English and Drama and theatre practitioner Jan Overfield to develop a Forum Theatre element of the work.

Each school sent up to four young people to participate in the project, held at the Y Theatre in Leicester. Each age group had two working days with us separated by a month in which they were encouraged to do further work and observation. The idea of the first day was to bring out experiences and stories through drama, cartoons, humour, sculpture and advanced circle and group work to develop a series of questionnaires. Each day was very intensive with up to 12 different workshop sessions as well as larger introductory and plenary sessions. Information was gathered and recorded in a variety of forms and six questionnaires were developed to cover the two age groups and teachers/ school workers (one of our most insightful responses was from a school dinner lady), children/young people and parents/carers. The second day was used to collect more feedback, as well as further work with the young people to refine the details of the problems they faced. We also used this time to highlight a wider range of solutions as well as to investigate the timing and location of bullying incidents, a vital piece of work in enabling the concentration of future resources.

The whole process elicited vast amounts of quality information which also explored the dynamics of bullying/victim behaviour and agency and parental responses. Getting to the heart of what young people often perceived as a failing service of care was vital to present the case for a major rethink about the issues.

As a participatory arts organisation we were delighted to have developed such an inspiring and thought-provoking project, with such a clear commitment from the commissioners and partners to take all the findings seriously and act on them at a policy level. The project has attracted widespread interest, not only in the UK but also further afield, and in particular one education authority in America which is considering a study of 90,000 pupils based on the young peoples? questionnaires.

The workshops were approached from an explicit desire to draw out an appreciation of the lives of young people at home, school and within the community. We also looked at the structures, behaviour and attitudes which underpin bullying and the responses to it. The drama and hands-on work gave the young people a variety of ways of expressing themselves, verbally, visually, through movement and tactile media. In fact, one of the most intimate and revealing workshops was one of the sculpture-based sessions constructing the characters of victim, bully and a friend. This became so animated that the sculpture was abandoned in favour of the flood of information people wanted to share ? this group worked through the break without realising it.

Response and discussion

At the end of the first workshop day each group was charged with returning to their schools to champion the questionnaire, encourage further discussion and action. Many young people felt committed and confident enough to do just that, whilst others met resistance and indifference. For those in a more responsive environment, new approaches were being seriously considered by schools even before the month was up. The returns on the survey totalled over 7,500, roughly 5,500 from children, 500 to 600 staff and over 1,500 parents. A major press and media campaign accompanied the whole project and many of these responses were as a result of Internet-based submissions.

The work with the children was followed up with a smaller group by Rob Osborn to present the findings to a one-day multi-agency conference at the end of June 2003. The findings had a powerful impact on the professionals gathered and many made very public commitments to renew their efforts to change the current situation. Armed with some of the very specific findings of the survey and some of the examples of how children and schools were already successfully dealing with issues, many of the professional delegates left with some clear ideas about the resource implications of action as well as inaction in these matters. In fact the conference wholeheartedly agreed that inaction was not an option! As a follow-up, we are now developing a web resource for teachers, parents and children, and the local authority is continuing to develop the process of policy formulation aided by our findings.

Creative approach

Over the years we have demonstrated to a wide range of authorities and agencies the value of creative approaches to consultation ? sometimes combining with more traditional methods, sometimes as standalones. We believe the arts can make an enormous contribution to developing an understanding of the dynamics of complex social issues and the exploration of personal fears, experiences and motivations to action. The bullying policy project managed this through a statistically relevant piece of work with a high qualitative significance ? and what?s more (for a difficult and highly personal subject) it was fun!

Kevin Ryan is Director of Charnwood Arts t: 01509 822558; e: kevr@charnwood-arts.org.uk; w: http://www.charnwoodarts.com