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Celebrating achievement 

Convince senior leaders and governors of the impact the arts can have on whole school outcomes

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Your senior leadership team is under many pressures: offering a balanced and rigorous education to their students; providing enough support to all their staff; engaging governors, trustees and proprietors; and appeasing parents. There’s a lot to balance. Amongst all of the demands on SLT’s time, the arts subjects can often slide down the priority list.

With schools being largely recognised and celebrated for their exam results, especially for facilitating subjects, these often get much of the focus and support, even in independent schools where the arts are also celebrated. It can be easy for SLT to lose sight of the many benefits of a formal arts education in favour of giving focus to core subjects.

Often missed is the evidence that investment in the arts actually improves outcomes in other academic areas. Aside from the fact that a less diverse, more streamlined education is starving children of skills and experiences they deserve to have, putting more weighting on certain subjects above others creates a negative tone about certain pathways and can create tension amongst staff. Here, we explore how SLT can be approached to prioritise arts provision in schools.

  • Whole-school improvement

    • Investing in the arts across your school – from planned lesson time to extra-curricular activities, youngest to oldest children, staff and students alike – creates positive and open-minded learners. More time spent creating directly correlates to improvements across the curriculum; the headteachers of five leading independent schools interviewed by the Cultural Learning Alliance all agreed that cultural learning improves children’s attainment.

    Many headteachers of independent schools additionally recognise the impact the arts plays on the wider education and school experience of their students. The recent report interviewing five leading independent school headteachers, highlights that:

    ‘In each of the schools arts subjects are a valued part of the curriculum in their own right. Cultural learning is embedded across the schools connecting and enhancing learning in other subjects. For all of the headteachers it was unthinkable that they would not provide arts and cultural subjects in their curriculum and in their schools. They saw them as essential to producing rounded, resilient, articulate thinkers who would succeed in the wider world and in providing a fulfilled and joyful childhood.’

    This in turn, increases the competition for students between schools within the private sector. If other independent schools do not follow suit and prioritise the arts in their schools, not only are they withholding a broad and rounded education from students, but there is a real chance that they will lose out on talented students, to other establishments.

    Did you know?

    Not just the visual arts, but taking part in structured music activities has also been proven to improve attainment in maths, early language acquisition and early literacy. The Arts Council has researched schools in the US and found:

    ‘Schools that integrate arts across the curriculum… have shown consistently higher average reading and mathematics scores compared to similar schools that do not.’

    By coming together across the disciplines, arts subjects may be able to make a stronger case for their value than subjects than they can alone.

    Furthermore, by creating opportunities for children to participate in the arts, and visiting cultural places of significance in the community – libraries, museums, galleries, theatres and historical sites – ties can be created with local groups. The benefits acquired through these relationships create a whole-school ethos of cultural appreciation, and can help schools to demonstrate their charitable ethos by building such partnerships.

    Put visual arts on the map

  • Cognitive and retention abilities

    • Due to the way creative thinking helps activate different parts of the brain, cognitive function is enhanced as a result of artistic pursuits, including the ability to retain information. The Cultural Learning Alliance has found that: ‘Participation in structured arts activities can increase cognitive abilities by 17%.’

    This isn’t only crucial for passing exams, but for life. ‘Waking up’ the brain to be as high functioning as possible, training it to work harder and retain information, enables children and young people to be better prepared for their adult lives. The arts exercises parts of the brain not accessed through other subjects, as The Healing Power of Art & Artists explains:

    ‘Research has proven the arts develop neural systems that produce a broad spectrum of benefits ranging from fine motor skills to creativity and improved emotional balance. Quite simply, the arts are invaluable to our proper functioning individually and as a society.’

    A concern of SLT should be to  prepare young people, not just to have successful and enjoyable school lives, but to be great thinkers in whichever field they enter as adults.

    Did you know?

    There is a biological argument in favour of art that cannot be denied: many thousands of years ago, humans developed the need and desire for art. It helped them visualise their future (mainly hunting) in a way that other animals didn’t. Over time, there grew a real enjoyment of and requirement for art.

    Without “exercising that muscle” in the brain, we are not reaching our full cognitive potential; but by taking part in artistic pursuits, our brain function improves. Other thinking tools such a philosophical argument, social awareness and community spirit are all developed by this higher level of thinking, too.  

    As artist and sculptor Henry Moore stated:

    ‘People cannot live without art – those who think they can don’t understand their own natures. In a way art is like a religion in that religion is a belief that life has a meaning – and an artist would not bother to work if he did not hold the same belief. Art is not a game.’

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  • Staff and student health

    • It isn’t only the wellbeing of students SLT are concerned with; a happy staff means a lower turnover and this ultimately costs the school less, means fewer disruptions and a more consistent education for students. Growing a loyal, skilful and satisfied teaching staff is of high priority to leaders and the arts can play a surprising part in job satisfaction for teachers and support staff.

    The Cultural Learning Alliance explains that:

    ‘Arts integration as an efficient, successful school improvement tool, raising attainment, improving the attendance and behaviour of students and increasing teacher morale.’

    This doesn’t only include teachers of the arts – whose role is indisputably important – but all staff could be encouraged to make time for participation in the arts. When almost 60% of people report good health if they’ve been to a cultural place or event in the last 12 months, there’s a strong argument for how getting involved in the organisation and running of arts events within school can have a marked impact on everyone contributing.

    Did you know?

    Not only does working on artistic projects outside of formal lesson time have positive benefits on stress levels and cognitive ability, but the social impact of collaboration can be vast, as explained in The Gifts of the Muse: Reframing the Debate about the Value of the Arts:

    ‘These intrinsic effects enrich individual lives, but they also have a public spillover component in that they cultivate the kinds of citizens desired in a pluralistic society.'

    These are the social bonds created among individuals when they share their arts experiences through reflection and discourse, and the expression of common values and community identity through artworks commemorating events significant to a nation’s (or people’s) experience.

    For schools, nurturing students to be reflective and feel part of the community will encourage the uptake of extra-curricular enrichment activities – not because they have to, but because they choose to.

    Put visual arts on the map