Pandemic offers narrow window to transform arts education, experts warn

Arts education experts have warned that the UK has a limited time after the pandemic to enact change and enhance the way children engage with culture at school, or risk entrenching existing inequalities.

Leading voices including Royal Shakespeare Company director of education Jacqui O’Hanlon, children’s author Piers Torday and education specialist Alison Peacock have called for more holistic approaches to arts education, to nurture the children and young people who have been affected by the pandemic and the loss of in-person teaching.

Torday, who has written several novels for children and adapted John Masefield’s The Box of Delights for Wilton’s Music Hall, said the education sector needed to “radically rethink” the platforms given to children to express themselves.

“[The pandemic has] created a golden window for change, but that will close as normal life returns. These next few months are really key in how we enable students to be heard and to articulate their anxieties and concerns about the future,” he told a panel discussion on post-pandemic arts and culture for children, hosted by London children’s theatre the Unicorn.

He said the arts should be “a podium – not an add-on, not an afterthought, not a luxury, but an essential right for everyone to make art and collaborate in art”.

Meanwhile, Peacock warned that without urgent efforts, schools could lose the ground gained from teaching more creatively during lockdown.

“I worry that we will very quickly return to the ‘compliance agenda’ if we’re not careful... where’s the humanity and passion? We have to put that at the forefront,” she said.

O’Hanlon, who runs the RSC’s education department – the largest at a theatre in the UK – has previously warned of the potential damage the pandemic could inflict on young people’s access to the arts, arguing that it is incumbent on organisations to be proactive.

This is especially important for children that are unable to engage digitally, and for young people whose only access to culture is at school, she told the panel.

“I want arts subjects to have parity with other subjects, and if arts subjects have parity with other subjects, every school in the country would be arts-rich. That is what every school in the country should be,” she said.

Her comments were echoed by Afsana Begum, who has worked in arts education for more than a decade and runs an all-female theatre company associated with the Mulberry School for Girls in Tower Hamlets.

“When schools closed down, it was the lack of space for practical skills that we lost. Not having that space to have live performances was one of the big impacts in school, especially if you live in a place where it’s impossible to develop your practical skills like you would in school. For most of our students, the only access to the arts is at school, so if we are unable to provide that for students then they miss out completely,” she said.

O’Hanlon added that the problems were particularly acute at secondary schools, where issues such as the lack of arts in the English Baccalaureate, and reforms to further education, remained sources of concern within the cultural sector.

“There is so much wonderful work that happens in primary, and it goes badly wrong with secondary. That’s become clear during this pandemic period,” O’Hanlon said, suggesting that the secondary education system needed an overhaul.

“How is it going to enable young people to take their place in the world? It is not an exam factory, it doesn’t work,” she said.

The panel discussion was held at the Unicorn Theatre in central London, where artistic director Justin Audibert added that the experience of lockdown had forced the theatre company to work in new ways.

Through a collaboration with a London primary school, the theatre had “moved the co-creation process into the heart of how we will make all of our engagement moving forward”, he said.