PLATINUM!
What a phenomenal achievement and genuine honour to be awarded Platinum ArtsMark! This puts us among a very small number of schools across the country leading in creative arts practice and cultural learning.
The ESA Artsmark story has been remarkable and rewarding - an authentic labour of love! The vision to be a leader in creative education and cultural learning has always been there but it takes time to learn what that really means and then establish, grow and embed a creative curriculum, build partnerships, define a pedagogical approach to teaching. All the while, wondering, reflecting and adjusting…
Artsmark is the only creative quality standard for schools and education settings, accredited by Arts Council England.
I was so pleased when ESA was recognised as ‘Good’ by Ofsted in 2019 but, as brilliant and as significant as that milestone was, I am considerably prouder of this achievement. This award means more because it is affirming of our core purpose, our vision and even our ‘faith’. It speaks to our ontology - why we are here... To challenge and transform a test based, standardised, top down, hierarchical education system. To establish an aesthetic, creative and relational approach to growing and learning. To wake young people up to their potential and uniqueness. To increase access for all learners, whatever their ‘status’, to a creatively empowered life with voice, compassion and opportunity. Vision like this can sometimes feel separate to daily school operations - break duties, blocked toilets, dress code checks, lesson planning, setting homework and data drops - BUT, in fact, the daily stuff is how grand vision is achieved and so you have to keep the ‘WHY’ at the forefront so that we know and share the direction - so that we can ‘keep the faith’. So that all the exhausting workload is meaningful, even joyful and hope inducing! The hard graft of teaching can really burn us all out if it is mundane. If we are just stuck in the ruts and routines of work, then creative vitality wilts and droops. We need our creative purpose because it creates energy, hope and joyous gumption!
That is why we started our Artsmark journey by looking at Simon Sinek’s idea of the golden circle. He explores what motivates people and why some movements and inventions have changed the world when others have not. He concludes that it is the ‘WHY’ that inspires and connects people. He uses examples from Martin Luther King Jr, Apple Computers and the Wright Brothers and discovers that the vision for ‘WHY’ is what set their movements apart. So we worked as a whole staff to define our ‘WHY’. We knew ‘WHAT’ we did and our specialist curriculum was already taking shape so we had some of the ‘HOW’ but we needed to explicitly define the ‘WHY’ so that we could ensure we stayed aimed at our core purpose. This was a process and we had a lot of words and pictures and we boiled it down and refined it until we had our ESA ‘WHY’ statement. Here it is:
“We believe in imagineering; Beautiful ideas and inspiring productions. Soulful, cultured, creative, professional, whole individuals collaborating and making together with identity and purpose.”
This ‘WHY’ statement has kept us committed and it has helped us review and reflect on our choices, making adjustments and implementations so that our ‘HOW’ and ‘WHAT’ are a connected consequence of our central ‘WHY’ purpose.
A screen grab of our ESA ‘Golden Circles’. The Why, How and What of ESA.
We never intended to hoover up accolades! That really wasn’t the goal, but in the last year or two, they have started flying in, first from ScreenSkills, then Challenge Partners and now Artsmark! We are of course delighted because we are taking it as a sign that we are starting to really get somewhere - our student numbers are rising, our partners are becoming more directly involved and we have more of them. We are working with more schools and community organisations. Our in-house student production company is making more content for more diverse clients. And, possibly most importantly, larger numbers of students are finding their place in employment opportunities across the creative industries. We are starting to find our voice as creative advocates beyond our own campus, supporting the creative pipeline into industry and challenging education to be more creatively ambitious with curriculum, pedagogy and careers.
One of the best things about being called ‘platinum’ is the symbolism. Platinum is considered valuable for a few reasons. People wrongly think it is the strongest metal - in fact, it is malleable, adjustable (more flexible than gold). It’s ‘strength’ comes from it’s stable nature. It is not reactive, making it an excellent vessel for reactions. It is an effective crucible. Indeed, platinum is most commonly used to make catalytic converters due to it ‘containing’ properties. How brilliant is this metaphor? This is precisely what I hope ESA can be - a safe and stable container for alchemy and magic.
So, going forwards, what magical chemistry can we whip up? While it’s hugely affirming to receive awards like these, it is actually more motivating. The team I work with were quick to wonder ‘what’s next’?
Well, we are determined to align creative education and the culture industries. We know that the creative technical arts sector has a skills shortage and a need to increase diverse stories and experiences - they sincerely want to support the training agenda and increase access for young people to get into the industry. Education needs to adjust further to meet this need. So there is a job for advocacy in two directions - to education and to the cultural sector. Large numbers of young people see film, TV and theatre as their dream job (20% of all under 18s according to the BFI), yet the sector is seen as impossible to get into (only 5% see working in the creative industries as ‘achievable’ according to the BFI). Both education and the industry need to better understand each other. If there is a skills gap, then there are certainly young people ready to go, given the right training. However a great number of schools are not emphasising the arts to the same extent as the traditional curriculum. This is increasingly true as school budgets are squeezed again and this is going to be savage in the coming few years. Education must address this problem - yes in terms of funding but actually even more so in the misguided ideology that sits beneath our mainstream curriculum where arts are undervalued.
Persistent myths also remain on the side of the creative industries, where some still struggle to trust the quality of arts training even though lots of creative arts provision is increasingly more technical, applied and up-to-date. There is still an assumption that schools deliver a media arts curriculum that is not fit for industry purposes - in the last 10 years that has shifted profoundly and industry needs to be helped to see the quality of creative practice in schools and the quality of young people available to them with the right support and training. Education needs to face out to the creative industries more confidently and the industry also needs to face education. If the pipeline is to flow, it must be connected at both ends.
So we intend to make a lot more noise about our creative pipeline curriculum. We need to contribute more meaningfully to the national careers picture, increasing our focus on the training opportunities through apprenticeships, traineeships and T Levels. We have begun talks with some key partners to this end including our Local Enterprise Partnership, ScreenSkills, Sky and Stage 50 (watch this space). ESA productions is also growing, now with new expertise in animation and motion graphics alongside our existing skills in film, online content creation and social media publishing. We also intend to develop our alumni community to help us challenge the myths in the creative industries.
So plenty to do… but we’re platinum right? We have the stability and flexibility to catalyse things.
