The Stage

ACE to improve children’s access to the arts nationwide

Published Tuesday 23 August 2005 at 12:50 by Nuala Calvi

Arts Council England will launch its first national strategy for children and the arts in the autumn, to address what officials say are the limited opportunities for young people from deprived areas to take part in cultural activities.

The organisation wants wider recognition of the “transformational power” of the arts and their potential for helping achieve government goals of tackling crime and anti-social behaviour.

It says recent government policy documents on children and young people - such as the Youth Matters green paper, which suggests giving young people shop discount cards in return for good behaviour - should make more reference to the role that arts can play in turning lives around.

Norinne Betjemann, ACE director of education and learning, said: “We want to see a wide social recognition of the value and power of the arts, which means making people in other sectors - and parents and young people themselves - aware of the benefits. There are many enlightened people in government who do see its value but we need to get the message out even wider.

“A key development in government is the Children Act 2004 and Youth Matters, which put young people at the centre of services. Health, education and social services are going to be working together and these services are meant to be engaging with leisure services as well. Arts providers need to be considered and made part of these discussions about how young people are supported.”

The ACE strategy will bring together the organisation’s various work with young people, such as Creative Partnerships, which enables artists and creative professionals to work with schoolchildren, and the Arts Award, which helps young people run their own arts projects. Each of ACE’s regional offices will draw up their own local strategies.

Jane Bryant, head of development for ACE South East, said: “We’ll be doing more on a strategic level rather than a project-by-project basis. For example, we want to expand the sort of approach we have used with Youth Arts Partnerships, where we work with local authorities to develop ways of reaching young people who are outside formal education. And we are going to change Creative Partnerships from working in one small area to working across a much larger area and taking what schools have learned to help other kinds of organisations, like museums or galleries.

“We feel our work can bring added value to the government’s own strategy. The time is right for us to start to influence the way other agencies work with children and young people and to show them that actually the arts can be a tool to help them do what they’re doing, to move young people on and give them a different view of the world through confidence, team building and so on.”