Reaching beyond the stars...

Last week (4/10/10) I presented at the Museums Association conference in Manchester as part of a panel session called ‘The Republic of Museums’ chaired by Tim Desmond from the Galleries of Justice in Nottingham. The theme of our session was partnerships in the new funding and policy era. I spoke about the opportunity and challenge of working with children and young people as partners in service reform and transformation. My key idea being that only by working collaboratively with each other and with young people will we be able to extend the benefits of the arts, creativity and culture to those young people who might currently be missing out. Foremost in my mind were the recent Taking Part Survey results which clearly identify a drop-off in cultural participation post compulsory school age, and research commissioned for the Find Your Talent programme which paints a picture of a long-standing failure to extend and sustain demand for culture beyond moderately affluent, already engaged communities.


These perspectives were reinforced the next day (5/10/10) at a session organised by CCE for their Young Facilitators, young people from across the country who helped drive the Tell Us Bus survey – a roaming, national review of young people’s opinions about culture. I won’t disclose their key findings here (a full report will come from CCE later in the year) but the young people involved (including three from the East Midlands) were inspirational in their collaborative skills, depth of commitment and insight.


All of these voices give rise to one clear but challenging conundrum: how can we ensure more children and young people have access to the benefits of culture? As our new government focuses on narrowing the attainment gap, it seems to me more important than ever that we put the benefits of culture more in the hands of more children and young people, particularly those with little prior experience of it. In an economic era of ‘something’ rather than ‘plenty’, we will need innovative partnership that help create and extend this offer, focusing first and foremost on the benefits to young people and their communities: but how?


Young people at the Tell Us Bus survey consultation spoke plainly about the need to invest in the existing and more accessible (to them) infrastructure of youth and community settings rather than ‘glittering’ new buildings that they find hard to get to, prohibitively expensive and imposing. This suggests an important departure from past cultural policy – where flagships were everything.


Now, local is everything: public services in the hands of those that use, and increasingly, create them. The cultural sector in the East Midlands is incredibly well suited to this task (given the right resources...), with a huge number of small organisations and individual practitioners spread over our considerable geography. Engaging with communities of greatest need in a sustainable way and producing compelling evidence of how the ‘gap’ is narrowed by culture will be some of the challenges here. But we must also ensure children have the opportunity to take part in culture on a variety of scales: the local, the regional, national and international, the intimate as well as the spectacular. Culture should help reveal new horizons and opportunities, not keep our eyes focused on the doorstep. In that sense, we need to work collaboratively with larger scale providers to connect the local with the national in a way that extends the fine-grain of regular interaction as well as the larger initiative-driven ‘moments’ of the past.


So, how do we find the new partnerships (rather than new government funded programmes....) that allow us to innovate, to extend demand and break long-standing barriers to participation? I have a sense that we – as the cultural sector – are part of the problem (running the risk of repeatedly selling our own wares....), which is why partnership working with children and young people – as co-creators of a new era of access and opportunity – appears an even more compelling solution.


But what are we offering? Another suggestion from the Tell Us Bus facilitators was the idea that yes, culture needs defining so that young people understand what the opportunities are, but that it then needs unleashing so that a wide variety of activities can be explored, driven by the user or creator. Here, culture, sport and recreational activities merge for young people in a way that focuses on what they want – great places to grow up – rather than what they are doing.


Perhaps this is what Tim meant by his Republic of Museums – a new approach to cultural provision that breaks down barriers and creates new, better integrated offers? This would certainly be hugely valuable, but I wonder if it goes far enough? With the inevitable reduction in funds, perhaps the ‘republic’ needs to be drawn more broadly, bringing together partners and providers with a variety of skills from a range of contexts that help create the great places?


What is clear is that as the culture sector prepares to ride the waves of next week’s comprehensive spending review, the old ways of thinking simply aren’t possible. As TMC builds new programmes with, by and for children and young people, we are looking for new opportunities with known as well as new partners. If you relish the new, have the ambition to do things differently, and want to create new opportunities, we would love to hear from you.