Creating Chances - Arts interventions in Pupil Referral Units and Learning Support Units

by Richard Ings, Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, 2004 ISBN 1-903080-01-0     £6.00 plus p&p

Creating Chances is the first part of the results of the ‘First Time Projects’ scheme, a collaboration between the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation and Arts Council England, which offered small grants to Pupil Referral Units and Learning Support Units to initiate artists’ residencies. The aim of the scheme was to enable teachers working in often difficult circumstances to understand the value of creative activities for pupils in their care. The scheme ran for nearly three years and assisted nearly 50 projects throughout England

This report aims to portray a series of impressionistic accounts of the day-to-day reality of arts residencies and its intended audience is both artists and teachers who are new to arts activities in these contexts and for more experienced practitioners and teachers, who may find resonances and insights into their own practice.

Richard Ing’s easy conversational style immediately makes you feel at home in each of the institutions and the respective projects covered in the report. Though each project has only a few pages, a real sense of the place, the pupils, teachers and the artists involved are effortlessly conveyed, choosing just the right amount of narrative, detail and quotes to give anyone a strong experience of having visited the projects and giving a real sense of how the artists work and why they are there.

The accompanying photographs are sensitively taken and presented to supplement the insights of staff and artists who recognise that as well as challenging behaviours, there are a lot of pupils who are “emotionally withdrawn, ‘invisible’ children,”

On its own, this report would add a valuable but limited record of qualitative data from arts interventions in these contexts, but it is strategically complemented by ‘Serious Play’, the second report from the Gulbenkian Foundation of this scheme, which is an in-depth evaluation of these arts projects, undertaken by the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER), and published in June 2005.

Angus McLewin, independent consultant in Arts and Social Policy

SAM's Books compiles the Bookshop section of Arts Professional magazine, and used to compile Bookshop in its predecessor, Arts Business. This review has appeared in Arts Professional or Arts Business. It gives a longer and more personal description of the book than appears in the booklists.