Artsmonkey Blog

I’m sat watching Dispatches on Channel 4 looking at the difference a good teacher can make on young peoples understanding of maths. They tested 150 primary school teachers and discovered that the standard was inadequate with only one teacher getting every question right.  The average score was 45% begging the question, how can they therefore be teaching numeracy if they don’t have the basic knowledge themselves. “I don’t think you can teach maths if you can’t do it either” .

And then the question of SATs was raised, is it fair to put our children under the pressure of SATs or the staff so much so that it interferes with the teaching of basic skills?

Have we become so obsessed with turning our teachers into social workers and generic repositories of limited amounts of information on such a vast scale of *everything* that it turns out the value of everything is *nothing*? 

 In 2009 more than one in five children left primary school having failed to grasp the basic maths skills required by the national curriculum. In a two-part special, ‘Kids dont count’ Dispatches asks why and how are we failing Britain’s children when it comes to maths.

You can take the maths test here http://www.channel4.com/programmes/dispatches/articles/maths-quiz

Two weeks ago I had one of those phonecalls. No,  not that kind of call. I mean one of THOSE phonecalls where the hair on the back of your neck prickles and you just know it’s going to be something good.  This call, went something along the lines of “Hello, you don’t know me but I work for LGiU, you responded to my boss via twitter and we’re doing something you might be interested in…” I listened, my curiosity was piqued by the mention of the words Children in Care and breakfast, count me in!

On reading the information Jasmine Ali Head of Children’s Services Network had sent me about LGiU’s proposal to get people round a table to look at “Only the best is good enough: improving education for children in care” all kinds of thoughts arose, like ‘ How come only 6% of care leavers go on to  university’?  ‘If children in care have wealthiest parent of all – the state, why is the state failing them’? What should be happening that isn’t? Is it lack of aspiration or lack of support from within and around our education system.  What about those who aren’t in the care system but through poverty, neglect or disruptive domestic lives struggle to engage with education fully and get the best from it.? It’s 2010 why haven’t we got it right by now!

The Local Government Information Unit’s (LGiU) strap line is INFORMATION INNOVATION INFLUENCE I’m a great believer in all of these things so I was keen to meet some like-minded people but unsure whether I was the right person to be sat round the breakfast table. I’ve been working with Jo Kavanagh from Medway  Looked after Children Team who is getting her teeth into the very same issue, so  I replied, suggesting she be invited and that a young person who had experience of the care system and who had gone on to University should also be present. Horses mouth and all that.

So here I am on the train home having spent an incisive two hours listening to experts and evangelists from Government, NSPCC and Local Authority settings talking over points raised, quoting statistics, facts, models and ideas and here’s what I’m taking away with me:

The solution will have to be about: the ability to make relationships (there was a lot of talk about social pedagogy (google it) and how building relationships are at the heart of good social work and a young person’s entitlement to have support from at least one trusted adult but it’s also about making relationships between a whole range of interested parties, the professionals who are involved in the lives of young people in care.

Consistency and transition. It has been proven that there are several points in a young person’s life when they are particularly vulnerable we tend to link these points to their learning journey, for example, starting school (sure start was introduced to help make this a positive and beneficial experience for the very young and their parents and carers) and then from primary to secondary education which ties in with emotional and hormonal changes (puberty) and then from secondary education to further and higher education which is, or should be, a much broader period of time given that young people in care aged 16 to 18  are having to deal with independency, and a range of practical issues that many young people don’t have to face until their mid-twenties or on leaving university.

The system we have has too many gaps, there is not enough focus on emotional and mental wellbeing, there is not enough understanding and listening. For the professionals working within that system it is very hard to put away their defence shields and be open to new perspectives. The system is large and there is not enough proof of efficacy, too much patching of the engine when perhaps the engine needs to be replaced?

There are significant obstacles to consistency of care. One is funding, two is lack of professionals with the right level of experience and skill and three is the tension between positive support and preventative measures and safeguarding practise and getting the balance between intervening too early or too late.

There are lots of models and examples of work being done by Children and Families Services across the country to work with ‘aiming high’ (google this as well)  and colleges and universities, or to run summer schools or set up virtual learning networks and even in the south west a ‘virtual school  council’ but there isn’t a framework to capture and evidence the benefits and value of the individual models, there isn’t enough evaluation that would allow for a clearer more focussed solution. May be because some of this work is only beginning ?

And finally, now is the time to act because the figures are shocking and if it’s left too long, the only way to improve the situation will be drastic measures and the people who will lose out if drastic measures and knee jerk interventions are imposed will be the young people themselves and they’ve got enough to deal with haven’t they.

It was good to know that something like LGiU exists, comforting to discover they are passionate, committed people who want action not just words, they’ve been listening very carefully and are ready to ‘kick off’.  Ripples in a pond or maybe in terms of a think tank, spreading thought waves across the social webverse and beyond?

Now I must go and google CHATHAM HOUSE RULES to find out just WHAT happened at Chatham House that resulted in the coining of the phrase.

So far this year snow stopped travel plans and play commenced (as long as my feet and hands are warm I love the snow!). Being based in South Wiltshire I had to go looking for it at first but once it finally settled everything looked beautiful and so began a magical start to the year.

Creativity 4 Health is in its final and most exciting year. The project co-ordinator, lead consultant and I, have put our artistic heads together and come up with a cookery theme for linking the various strands, events and legacies of the project together. Food has always been close to my heart and there has been an upsurge of food-linked art work emerging through 2009. I am now doubly motivated to mine and excavate examples from participating Local Authorities  of how involvement with creative activities has inspired, enhanced and developed emotional, mental and  physical wellbeing for foster-children and foster-carers across the South East (or should that be recipes?). I’m also excited about our celebration event in October that is currently being shaped and planned by Kevin Skinner Ltd. Also the Creativity 4 Health website being developed by Alive With Ideas (and indeed they are!) is moving on apace as is the training package aimed at up-skilling foster carers to participate in creativity sessions with their foster children along with the accompanying *creativity cookbook* we aim to put together.

I’m also excited about working with the new South East regional development agency for the Arts Award  ‘Future Creatives’. Down the road from me the Portsmouth and urban South Hampshire ‘Find your Talent’ scheme has been promoting and enabling young people to undertake the Arts Award  and artists and arts organisations to deliver it in partnership with Artsworks ‘Academy’ project. Oxfordshire Youth Arts Partnership (OYAP) have just launched their young leaders scheme in association with Creative Junction and Oxford Brookes. The Arts Council England have launched their ‘Achieving Great Art for Everyone’ consultation and I really hope that this time they will listen to feedback and then get out there and talk to the people who respond rather than treat it as an information giving exercise dressed up as ‘debate and discussion’ the comments on Mark Robinsons brief on the ACE website are well worth a read. It’s all go, go, go.

Plus there has been the adventure of enabling young people to take over an empty shop unit aka ‘The Unit’ and turn it into a ‘youth info centre’. Myself and Director Ruth Jones at Firestarter Arts and Keith Gale the Project Manager have learnt so much about the responsibility of taking over an empty shop; from leasehold agreements to chasing changing goal posts from potential funders to handling difficult behaviour and public misconceptions but our voluntary youth committee have given impromptu presentations at local council area board meetings, met and talked with local politicians, community police, city business representatives and managers, been interviewed on local radio and shown determination and skill in acclimatising to a world of commerce with monetary expectations requiring instant outcomes and constant reassurance.

We’re getting there. Summary update = Gala Bingo the owners and our immediate neighbours have continued to support and encourage, a carpenter made us some shop window display boards, a young digital media artist has offered to help us utilise technology to promote information and activities, a local church has donated the collection from a carol concert and we have a badge making machine and to be honest, somehow the badge machine is THE thing – I had no idea just how brilliant a marketing tool a badge machine could be. It’s a very promising start to what was always going to be a challenging year.

Oh yes and this July will see another *shift* in how things happen as Pilot Theatre Company and York Theatre Royal host the third annual #Shift Happens conference . ALT SHIFT on the 5^th and 6^th July looks at Arts, learning and technology; building and strengthening networks, policy, ideas, approaches and conversations – can’t wait! Mentally, I’m already in the queue for the  bar-b-q on the opening evening.  As they say on Twitter and Facebook – YAY!

I travel quite a bit in my role as a freelance creative consultant and often at my own expense, so I’m careful about my journeys. One of my favourite journeys is returning home from Brighton.

Brighton, as far as I can tell is like Marmite, you either love it or you hate. I love it. I always meet interesting people, I often learn something new and am usually invigorated by the cultural buzz of the place. My journey there could involve the M25 but for obvious reasons only does so if I need to avoid the racing traffic in the summer. Usually I travel out of Wiltshire into Hampshire and take the scenic route via West Sussex into East Sussex. Skirting past Southampton and Portsmouth along the M27, to join the A27 through Chichester, Arundel and Lancing, before finally dipping into Brighton via the Devils Dyke.

Sometimes if my meeting or event is at a reasonable time, I’ll park at Chichester and get the train in and out which is usually fun and never dull. However, my favourite journey is the one home, when occasionally I have the leisure to travel back along Brightons Regency seafront with the sea on one side, bandstands, mini golf, the rusting silhouette of the West Pier and beautiful architecture from many decades, on the other. The landscape closes in a bit after Hove, passing by Hove Lagoon and more beach huts, then on to Shoreham which gets more commercialised and ‘shipping industrial’.This week I was travelling at dusk and the fishing boats in Shoreham harbour were dramatically lit up as a flock of seagulls circled above in the darkening sky. Shoreham is a mish-mosh of run down industrial, estuary foreshores, maritime contemporary and reviving town with a history, the Rope Tackle Building is a treat to come across as I veer off across the bridge over the mud flats (depending on the tides) past all the new apartments and houses on Shoreham Beach towards Lancing and then Worthing.  

Travelling with glimpses of the sea on one side always raises my spirits and the light that changes, as anyone who lives by the sea will know is magical, suprising, breath-taking often. Always taking the chore out of sitting in any traffic that may occur at any point. And then Worthing, with its seafront Guest Houses and B&B’s. If you turn left as you enter the town you can travel along the Worthing seafront with its theatre on the pier and grand seafront hotels and buildings towards the very Wildian ‘Goring by Sea’ where in the summer I detour via Ferring beach to drink in the salty air and art deco houses. Then on via Littlehampton past Poling through Wick and Lyminster to rejoin the A27 just before Arundel perched so majestically on its hill.  

Then I’m back in the heart of horse and hounds county of West Sussex with its racing of the equine and automotive kind courtesy of Fontwell and Goodwood, only glimpsing the sea again as I approach Portsmouth for another visual feast as Langstone Harbour comes into view. I get one final contact with the sea as I cross the river Hamble before returning to the leafy, earthy loamy views of Wiltshire fields and rolling hills.

It pains me to contemplate what I’ll do if my work stops taking me to East Sussex with its historic sea frontage and the compelling lure of the sea.

Today is November the fifth a day for plots and coup attempts, remember? Well today also marked the official launch of the National Theatre of Wales and boy did they do it in style. Not only were parties being thrown across Wales but Producer Lucy Jones and Artistic Director John McGrath shared the event online with people across the world. Let’s face it the Welsh know how to do Culture, in many ways they epitomise culture and ‘national’ they certainly know all about that, from fighting to retain their language and heritage, to forming their own Parliament to seeding their musicians, writers, actors and artistic talents across the world.

In fact, you have to wonder what kept them so long, well this was all explained at the launch and then we were treated to a filmic feast of what’s in store over the next year (2010) with live links to a school in Bridgend, an artist at the summit of Snowdonia another in a lighthouse and live chat from three young artists in the National Theatre social network chat room 

http://community.nationaltheatrewales.org/

http://news.bbc.co.uk/1/hi/wales/south_west/8344309.stm  

The long and the short is that it is all very exciting and inclusive, as work will be truly national and taking place all over not just city-centric. For us social media queens and geeks there will be digital technology aplenty as the NTW embraces new technology and new ways of taking theatre and art to the people - I can’t wait, the ‘For Sale’ sign is up, my bags are packed and I’m moving (unless that is, train tickets get cheaper in which case, I’ll just commute as I still remember how ‘incomers’ holiday cottages were vandalised and burnt in the seventies).

Whatever, good art deserves a chance and next year I will at the very least, be winging my way to Port Talbot for the finale - Michael Sheens collaboration with poet Owen Sheers who will be staging a contemporary version of the towns ‘Passion Play’.

London’s National Theatre is just that, in London. The National Theatre of Wales promises to be much more, much, much more. 

http://www.nationaltheatrewales.org.uk/

autumn haiku

.CrispAutumn.
Dead leaves hang from tree
like brown butterfly cocoons.
Seasons of nature.  ©theboywyatt 

This week sees National Poetry day come around again. I have a love/hate relationship with this day ever since I was asked to be part of a team delivering ‘poetry on the buses’ with mixed success. Our carefully picked mix of contemporary and classic poetry, read out between stops (by myself, an actresss, an actor and a storyteller) as we circumnavigated the citys’ bus routes, was more than once met with rage and fury. This was before i-pods and mp3 players and I often wonder how people would respond now (if at all). It could have been because we were butchering their favourite poem with our interpretation but I think it was about the invasion of their headspace, the precious time when they shut off and allow the bus to carry them, alone with their thoughts from A to B and not to be cruelly interrupted by caterwauling thespians! I still remember the look on the persons face who insisted the driver stop to let them off, so indignant where they, or maybe it was fear that they might be asked to join in? Either way – tough audience. I declined when invited to repeat the event the following year. 

But I do love poetry. It started at school, by writing and swapping really, really bad song lyrics with friends in my class. By the fifth form it had evolved into poetry and our group had expanded  - we became an ‘unofficial poetry club’. I wrote tons of the stuff, not much of it good. Although my English teacher did compare a poem I wrote about a ‘deer’ to Ted Hughes work once, which I grew to appreciate having gone off to find out who Ted Hughes was. And many years later, I met a man who recognised me because his daughter had been one of those ‘poetry enthusiasts’ and he told me how miserable she had been at school until she joined our ‘group’, how it had saved her. I had no inkling at the time but I knew what he meant. Something about expressing yourself through poetry and indeed reading other people’s poetry that goes beyond the depth of a play script, cuts through, creates a bond, a sense of place, of being.                                                        

At drama school I used to write people poems for birthday presents and each year I was entered in for the annual ‘Poetry Cup’, usually two days before the event because no-one else had volunteered. I never won. I rarely got through the whole poem without forgetting the words because unlike plays (in my head, at the time), performing a poem demanded a degree of skill and utter command on a far higher plane than simply inhabiting a character, and just like plays required far more rehearsal than I found time for. Hey ho. It got me and some peers invited to tea with a lady called Morag from Surrey Unversity who regarded us thespians as suitable fodder to showcase her students work, by putting us together for evenings of poetry, so we would look bad and her students would shine (sorry Morag, I’m sure it wasn’t your intention, it just felt like that). Which was funny because her students read their work like thespians and we read the poems like ‘shared truths’ which I think had more impact. 

So back to National Poetry day, we’re seeing some inventive celebrations of it this year and I have two favourites; both invitations. Firstly on ‘Spoonfed’ http://www.spoonfed.co.uk/spooners/lowri-257/national-poetry-day-1555/  you are invited to share your favourite poetry, or write your own ‘off the cuff’ (just my kind of challenge) and the other a more daring sortie by The Southbank Centre, http://gps.southbankcentre.co.uk/ who are running *G.P.S Global Poetry System* subtitled Poetry. Find it, map it, share it – an excellent suggestion and I urge you to do so.

Haiku’s courtesy of ‘theboywyatt’ http://theboywyatt.blogspot.com/

  .GoFasterStripes.
Loudly tooting horn!
flicking the V’s at the flash.
Speeding road rager.  ©theboywyatt, 2009

I recently attended a ‘speed awareness workshop’ having been caught speeding by one of  Wiltshires 18 (approx.)  mobile speed camera’s, like many other unfortunate motorists across the county. I’m not proud to be caught speeding, unintentionally as it was because no matter how you dress it, FACT speed kills and approximately 11 people die each day from being involved in road traffic accidents around the country at huge emotional and financial cost. 

Attending a ‘SAW’ is a double edged sword because whilst the whole process leading up to the workshop itself can leave you feeling criminalised / angry / ashamed /put upon, the actual workshop is a really worthwhile, sensitively run, educational and an enjoyable experience. For some it really is an eye opener, for others thought provoking but one thing it is NOT is a waste of time.  I had expected it to become a forum for people to protest their innocence and bemoan the blight of speed camera’s on our roads waiting to entrap unsuspecting motorists and make loads of moolah for the coffers but it wasn’t. I really benefited from attending a SAW but the one thing the workshop didn’t do was convince me that speed camera’s are a positive means of improving road safety, like the issuing of parking tickets and wheel clamping I think that despite good intentions these measures are more successful at criminalising people who really don’t intend to behave in an unlawful way. As they said at the beginning of our workshop we are human, prone to human error, we are not perfect, we all make mistakes, which is why if ALL drivers had to attend a Speed Awareness Workshop some five to ten years after passing their driving test and then again after a further ten years and so on, I feel that would be a much more effective way of both educating drivers on our roads today and also of improving their awareness and driving skills.  

As one of our trainers stated, not many drivers, having passed their driving test give any thought to improving or developing their driving skills and can be embedding and continuing bad and lazy habits in their driving for the rest of their driving days. The law, road signage, road design, has changed so much since I learnt to drive.  Given the ability to maim, seriously injure, or kill either yourself or another person/s whilst in control of a vehicle it’s suprising we give it so little attention.  Surely, if we poured the same resources and energy that Local Authorities spend on administering parking fines into making learning to drive just the start of a life-time process more people would behave more responsibly on our roads and there would be less need to waste valuable police resources on issuing speeding fines and manning mobile speed traps? In our working lives we have continuing professional development – driving is as important as our careers to those of us who do it – for many the ability to drive is a life-line so why not mandatory refresher training and continuing education? 

 .88MilesAnHour.
Flaming tire tracks,
Back to the Future stylee,
speeding driver flies.  © theboywyatt

Well, I was going to write a piece moaning about the injustice of sixth form and exam pressures etc., but you’ll be pleased to know that you’ve been spared any grumblings as I’ve just discovered THE BIG LUNCH campaign http://www.thebiglunch.com which aims to give us all something to smile about, reinforce a sense of community, share food we’ve grown and break bread with our neighbours by holding a street party in our street, a field, a patch of common ground, etc, on JULY 19^th. It’s not just about sharing food, it’s about making music, performing, swapping seedlings, getting out our hidden talents and bringing them to the party – sketching the event, making decorations …endless ways to be involved.

The Big Lunch is a UK initiative created by Tim Smidt and friends at the Eden Project with the aim of putting a smile back on Britain’s face. It’s an idea with legs and no reason why it shouldn’t travel a little further afield.A party in your street! How long has it been since the Queens Silver Jubilee, possibly you’ve never experienced a street party? Lots of support on how to organise and manage such a thing on the website (see link above) and you can look and see if one is already planned near you. Lots of supporting partners are also getting onboard to help make it easier for you to do this. Businesses could hold one, Arts Organisations could plan one, Schools can do this (easy peasee). C’mon let’s do this! Let’s come together right now and do THE BIG LUNCH (you know you want to).

I have become a fan of emerging new artist Jon Hawke aka @theboywyatt especially his poetry which takes me from sadness to uncontrollable giggling fits. He recently launched his poem “That Older Woman” via Twitter and his Tumblr blog and it had a great response especially from those of us for whom it may have been written – who really felt quite flattered (slightly pink cheeked even). To echo the words of one reader Elly Laine “I want to pick him up and put him in my pocket”. I suspect it’s now pinned up on fridges all over the world, that’s the wonderment and the challenge of social media – instant access. If you take a peek and like his work, do let him know – feedback is to artists what a good hairdresser would be to Donald Trump – Vital  ;0)