The Blueprint We Didn’t Know We Were Following
Three years ago we built CATS largely on instinct and necessity. Now a major independent study suggests we may have stumbled upon something remarkably close to the model that works.
When we started Cotswolds Arts Through Schools, there was no grand theory behind it. We built it the way we did because, practically, it seemed obvious. First, get together arts organisations that wanted to help. Secondly, raise some money so that help could actually be offered and then find good professional artists and musicians and spread the cost of their expertise across a network of small rural schools — schools which individually could never justify employing all those specialists themselves. Let every school decide its own priorities rather than arriving with a programme and telling them what they needed and work with genuine arts organisations rather than attempting to recreate their expertise ourselves.
Three years later, it turns out that, without really knowing it, we had been building something remarkably close to the model that a major piece of independent research says actually works, which is both reassuring and rather useful because we now think we know how to develop it further… the problem, inevitably, is paying for it.
What makes a school arts-rich?
The RAPS project — Researching the Arts in Primary Schools — was led by Professor Pat Thomson, Professor Christine Hall and Liam Maloy at the University of Nottingham and funded by the Freelands Foundation.
It is one of the most substantial studies of arts-rich primary schools undertaken in England. The researchers surveyed 76 arts-rich schools, interviewed 854 children and 150 adults, surveyed 1,017 Year 5 pupils, and gathered documentation and photographic evidence from 41 schools – importantly, they didn’t simply ask arts-rich schools whether they thought the arts were a good thing.
For part of the analysis, they used the Education Endowment Foundation’s “families of schools” data to compare 22 RAPS schools with 44 schools serving similar populations, taking into account factors including prior attainment, eligibility for free school meals and children speaking English as an additional language.
The headline finding is one we have written about before:
77% of the arts-rich schools performed as well as or better than comparable schools on standard measures.
And 36% performed well above their local authority average, compared with 28% of comparator schools. In other words, giving children a rich arts education does not appear to come at the expense of academic attainment.
But for me, the really interesting part of RAPS isn’t that headline, it is what sits underneath it because parts of the report read remarkably like a description of what we have been trying to build at CATS.
Put specialists in front of children
One of the clearest RAPS findings is the importance of specialist arts expertise. Across the 76 schools surveyed, 80% had specialist music teachers but only 52% had specialist art teachers, 33% specialist dance teachers and 29% specialist drama teachers. The 40 schools selected for detailed case-study work all had at least one specialist teacher. This immediately rang bells.
A generalist primary-school teacher is expected to do an extraordinary number of things. With good schemes and resources, many can teach visual art extremely well. Music can be harder. Leading a room of children in song, teaching an instrument or developing musical progression requires expertise and confidence which cannot simply be conjured up because Tuesday afternoon happens to say “Music” on the timetable.
RAPS concludes that specialist arts teachers are in short supply in primary schools but are key to developing expressive arts provision. Our solution has been slightly different from many of the schools studied. Some RAPS schools are large enough, or have found sufficient resources, to employ their own specialists. Many of our schools cannot. A small rural primary school with perhaps 80 or 100 children cannot realistically employ its own professional musician, sculptor, textile artist, drama practitioner and dance teacher. So instead of putting a specialist in each school, CATS pools specialist expertise across schools.
A professional musician can work across several schools. Artists move around the network. Partnerships with arts organisations can reach multiple schools rather than having to be negotiated separately by every headteacher. Rather wonderfully, RAPS itself identifies sharing costs across a network of schools as one way schools can resource arts partnerships. That is, essentially, what CATS does — but at the scale of more than 70 schools.
If RAPS helps tell us what an arts-rich school needs, CATS may offer one answer to how you provide it in places too small, too stretched or too poorly funded to buy all that expertise individually.
Don’t do everything yourself
The second RAPS finding that reads like a description of our own model is partnerships. 81% of arts-rich schools surveyed had partnerships with arts organisations, and 82% were part of some kind of arts network. The report is explicit that these partnerships aren’t a bolt-on — they add real specialist expertise that the school could not otherwise afford, and the strongest, longest-running ones fundamentally shape a school’s whole arts offer and calendar. That is a precise description of what Longborough Festival Opera, Oxford Opera, the Academy of Barmy Composers, the Royal Ballet School, our expert artists, and our partnerships with musicians, textile specialists and film specialists already do across our network — not visiting once, but returning, term after term, year after year.
Seventy schools don’t need the same thing
RAPS also confirms something we have always believed but rarely had the words for: there is no single template for what an arts-rich school looks like. One head in the study compared it to building a shelter — the same principles of light, air and structure produce an igloo at the North Pole and a tent in the desert, because the right design depends entirely on where you are. RAPS schools built their arts-richness around their own places, histories and communities: one school built its arts week around a Victorian dressmaker born in their tiny Lincolnshire town; another around the textile mills that once employed half the village. CATS’s own self-audit model is our version of exactly this principle — we do not arrive with a fixed programme. Each school works out what arts-richness means for them, and we resource what they decide they need. However, what we are finding is that schools with so little arts happening already are struggling to do their audits, or even know what to ask for and how to integrate it.
Finally, and less happily, RAPS confirms that the challenges we wrestle with are not unique to CATS, to our small rural schools, or to the Banbury schools where the statistics look like those of a poor inner-city area — they are systemic. The heads in the study named, again and again, the same pressures we live with: funding that has to be found afresh, year on year, often through a head’s own entrepreneurial effort; real difficulty recruiting and retaining specialist arts staff; and constant pressure from an overcrowded curriculum and the pull of tested subjects. As one head in the study put it, ring-fencing funding and resource for the arts is a long-term investment even when budgets are tight — precisely the argument we make every time we ask a funder for support.
None of this tells us anything we didn’t already believe. But it is a genuinely different thing to have a five-year, independently funded, methodologically serious piece of research confirm, point by point, that the model we built by instinct and necessity is the model the evidence says actually works — specialist expertise, real partnerships, local ownership, and no penalty to a child’s other learning. We didn’t need RAPS to tell us the arts matter. It’s rather more useful that it tells us we’ve been building the right kind of thing.
