A R&D project that is investigating where and how children and young people are developing their visual arts and creative interests in the city of Wolverhampton
Funded by the Commonwealth Games Legacy Fund through the WMCA and City of Wolverhampton Council.
The project
This research and development project focusses on three themes that support our goal of improving the creative eco-system of the Black Country region – equalities, evidence and young people’s voice. There are three connecting elements to the project.
The first is building the evidence base of where young people have opportunities to develop their visual art interests and skills outside of formal curriculum time in Wolverhampton. Our focus is finding out where there are opportunities for children and young people to participate in an art club in the city, after school, in the community or with an arts organisation.
Brook, O’Brien, Taylor and others show that class, race and disability related disadvantage in the creative industries starts in early life, with unequal access to cultural experiences, disparity in cultural education participation and achievement, a lack of role models and a lack of familial experience of the world of creative work.
We think that art clubs have an important and overlooked role in providing a distinct space where children can develop these capacities. So we want to know where there is provision, why it is provided and what value they generate for club leaders, children and young people. To find this out at scale we developed and administered a survey to Wolverhampton schools and plan to use this new tool to add to the evidence base across the wider region. We are grateful to Sam Perks at the ConnectEd Partnership for her support in distributing the survey to city schools.
Secondly we are conducting some field visits to different art clubs in schools of different phases and those in settings outside of school. These will enable us to add qualitative evidence about what children and young people do, what they value about their participation and maybe establish a typology of art clubs as they are all not the same and reflect the skills and values of the club leader.
We will share our initial findings from the survey and our field work in 2025 and continue to develop this research focus. This will support us in exploring the potential for a connected network of high-quality art clubs across schools and community spaces, which can offer a pathway of opportunity for a child from primary school onwards.
The third element of this project is working directly with young people to make visible their views and ideas on the city they live in, an insight into their creative lives and to share this with city policy makers as they consider the cultural future of the city.
We worked with a group of Y10 students studying Visual Communications at Moseley Park School in Bilston and with Y12 Photography Students at Heath Park School, both part of The Central Learning Partnership Trust.
With artist Tom Hicks (Black Country Type) and teachers Katie Lester and Michael Parks, we worked over six weeks to produce a photography exhibition at the Urban Room in Wolverhampton called What We See…photography by young people of an encounter with their city.
Over the course of the 2024 autumn term we:
- Explored the psycho-geographies and mapped where students did things in their localities and city centre and planned the project referencing the work of artists Mike Kelly, Trisha McKay and Vanley Burke amongst others.
- Tasked students to take photographs of places and spaces in their locality that held meaning to them.
- Visited the School of Art at the University of Wolverhampton and took part in a half day photo walk led by Tom exploring Wolverhampton city centre and capturing images on phones or SLR cameras.
- Back in school we worked through the process of analysing images, cropping, selecting two images for the exhibition and writing a narrative of why students wanted to tell their story with these images.
- The images were printed by Jim Abernathy, technician at the School of Art and curated into an exhibition by the Arts Connect team with support from Ewan Johnstone from the Urban Room.
- The exhibition of student’s photographs opened in December 12th, 2024 at the Urban Room in Wolverhampton City Centre.
Why are we doing this?
To provide an evidence base that will shape our future activity to improve the creative ecology of the city.
What evidence supports our case?
Cutmore, Llewellyn and Atkinson (2020) in their evaluation of the DfE pilot programme in Educational Opportunities Areas found that participation for disadvantaged children in extracurricular activities can lead to improved aspirations, improved behaviour and educational engagement and over the long term to improved employability and social mobility. These are all salient findings that can be applied to art clubs especially as just under half of all centres offered art activities with nearly 10,000 attendees over a two year period.
Who is involved?
- Heath Park and Moseley Park schools
- Artist Tom Hicks
- Art teachers Katie Lester and Michael Parkes
- Ewan Johnstone from the Urban Room
- Sam Perks at ConnectEd Partnership
- We are grateful to the teachers that tested the survey – Ruth Craft, Emma Howes, Gurdip Kaur, Rachel McEntee
Get in Touch
Please contact Arts Connect for further information about our work on Expanding Creative Spaces for Making.
Main image credit: Tarun