Head’s Blog: A Case For The Arts

Deputy Head, Al McConville looks at the value of artistic subjects within a curriculum.

A group of KAS students recently attended a music workshop for migrants, asylum seekers and refugees as part of our Global Challenges course. They shared musical instruments from around the globe, and within two hours a skilled facilitator had turned them from a disparate group of strangers into a harmonious collaborative, producing genuinely beautiful, moving music as a symbol of their shared humanity. This is the power of the arts. They break down boundaries and transform our understanding of ourselves in relation to others.

The King Alfred School has a proud tradition of valuing the arts. It’s distinctly counter-cultural in the education world to place Film, Art, Design, Drama, Music, Photography on an equal footing with more traditionally ‘academic’ subjects, but it’s happily the case that at KAS there’s no scepticism about students pursuing an arts-based education. We recognise not only the intrinsic value of the arts in a rounded life, but also their more instrumental use in the world of work, and their role in developing the much-sought transferable skill of creativity.

We must keep flying this flag. Beyond KAS numbers of students pursuing arts subjects has been in sharp decline. This is an issue of equity and social justice.

Frustratingly, the country’s outdated GCSE accountability system relegates arts subjects to the margins. Since its implementation, they have not been counted in the all-important ‘EBacc’ measure and are essentially bundled into an ‘other’ column from which students can choose a limited number of subjects alongside a large chunk of compulsory, or preferred, subjects for the other big beast of metrics, Progress 8. This ultimately gives the distinct impression that the arts don’t matter as much… inevitably feeding into A Level uptake, which has fallen steadily at a national level. The rhetoric about the arts at Higher Education level has been equally discouraging, with frequent disparagement of creative degrees over the years by individuals in positions of power and influence.

There may, however, be hope, with growing recognition that for too long now communities across the country have been deprived of access to culture. Turner-nominated artist David Shrigley takes succour from this and is seeking to reconnect the arts to the rest of the curriculum by emphasising the connections between the arts and the ‘STEM’ subjects, developing ‘STEAM’ projects for schools (Science, Technology, Engineering, Art, Maths). He recently unveiled a nine-metre sculpture called the Mantis Muse as part of his campaign to reignite the arts in schools by demonstrating the interdisciplinarity required to create something meaningful.

He argues, “Art subjects are the only subjects that give kids agency to do something, because the way you learn to do maths, the way you learn to do science, is really just about remembering information and being able to apply that information to problem solving… Whereas an art education is about setting your own path, setting your own parameters, creating your own project.”

KAS has a natural affinity with the views of the late, great educationalist Sir Ken Robinson, who argued that Dance was as important as Maths. We feel the same way about Film, and the other arts subjects. They are fully realized vehicles for fundamental human expression, and an education without access to them in an impoverished one.

KAS is great at giving students agency. They are lucky to have a genuinely open set of choices at GCSE and A level, and it is telling that so many include more than one arts subject in their line-up. Telling, too, is the sheer variety of institutions KAS students go on to after school, many of which extend their artistic education. Our students are privileged, and we see the joy it brings them, especially when they showcase their work, such as at the stellar recent film screening of award-winning student work at the Crouch End Arts Cinema.

We have a responsibility, though, to share this privilege through our advocacy and partnerships, such as our emerging work with the Babylon Migrants Project. We have recently established relationships with other local headteachers to work out how we can best work together, and the arts will, quite rightly, be a critical part of these future initiatives. To steal from the school motto, out of the arts springs life!