0202-Cornbleet-Arts_education.pdf

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Arts education

and the

disaffected

studentAnnie Cornbleet

Principal, Daniel House Pupil Referral Unit

Hackney, London

Introduction

Ihave worked in education for almost thirty years in

the UK and internationally. Since 1987 when I co-

founded an international theatre company called

CETTIE (Cultural Exchange Through Theatre In

Education), I have worked as an arts practitioner and

arts education consultant in parallel with my teaching

career. I have consistently tried to reinvigorate and

inspire young people and teachers through the use of

drama across the curriculum.

In his excellent book Out of our Minds, Ken Robinson

talks at length about the hierarchy of knowledge that

makes up the British National Curriculum and howoutdated it is in our massively changing 21st Century.

As s omeone who taught both drama and science in the

late 1970s I learnt first-hand what this hierarchy

meant. When I was being a science teacher, I was

treated with respect and as though I was intelligent.

When I was being a drama teacher, I was seen as a

radical feminist, a hippy, a troublemaker. These

superficial stereotypes confirm Ken Robinsons

findings: that in the UK (and likely elsewhere) we have

a totally different level of respect towards the arts and

sciences and this has a detrimental effect on the

education of our young people. Given the epidemic of

disaffected young people for whom education holds

no value, we need to radically re-think the system that

we currently ha ve. Ar ts education, is, I bel ieve, the

antibiotic injection required to heal this sickness, and

I hope that this article will help others to realise the

potential of the arts to re-engage the most difficult and

disaffected young people in our schools.

Pupil Referral Units the end of the road?

I am currently the principal of Daniel House, a small

secondary school-age Pupil Referral Unit (PRU) or

alternative high school in the London Borough of

Hackney. I have only been in this post two years after

managing three other inner London PRUs. Pupil

referral units are legally both a type of school and an

alternative to school. Their small size, rapidly

changing roll and the type of pupils they teach mean

that they are not subject to all the legislative

requirements that apply to mainstream and special

schools. A PRU must, however, have a policy on

Special Educational Needs and appropriate Child

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Beneath the Hood, Eelyn Lee Productions

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Protection procedures. The 1996 Education Act places

a duty on local education authorities or other agencies

delivering education services to provide full-time

education for young people who are permanently

excluded (expelled) from mainstream school. There

are other reasons why a young person may be at a

PRU, such as persistent truanting and teenage

pregnancy. At Daniel House, the student body is made

up entirely of permanently excluded young people

from the ages of 11 16. Many of them have been

excluded for seriously threatening or violent

behaviour. They are sometimes referred to as havingESBD (Emotional, Social and Behavioural Difficulties).

In a nutshell, our students are unable to be

accommodated in mainstream schools and present

very serious and complex emotional and behavioural

issues at the PRU.

PRUs have very small classes (often no more than six

in a group) and will sometimes employ teaching

assistants as well. The much greater adult:student

ratio means there is a certain amount of success for

most of the youngsters attending. However, sometimes

even this amount of care and attention does not do

the job and young people can become involved in

crime and end up at Her Majestys Pleasure (a legal

term referring to a prison sentence being handed

down for as long as the authorities think it is

necessary) in a Young Offenders Unit instead of re-

integrating back into mainstream school. This articleaddresses the value of arts education when working

with such youngs ters.

The International Journal on School Disaffection Trentham Books 200432

Beneath

the

Hood,

Eelyn

Lee

Productions



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Arts Education reaching the parts other

subjects cannot reach.

As Ken Robinson put it:

In many school systems throughout the world, there

is an imbalance in the curriculum. The emphasis is

on science, technology, mathematics and language

teaching at the expense of the arts, humanities and

physical education. It is essential that there is an

equal balance between these areas of the

curriculum. This is necessary because each of these

broad groupings of disciplines reflects major areas of

cultural knowledge and experience to which all

young people should have equal access. Secondly,

each addresses a different mode of intelligence and

creative development. The strengths of any

individual may be in one or more of them. A narrow,

unbalanced curriculum will lead to a narrow,

unbalanced education for some if not all youngpeople.

2

The rigid compartmentalisation of subjects within the

National Curriculum causes problems, particularly for

the arts, which generally are not seen as a discipline.

Learning the Periodic Table and remembering it is

seen as academic work; learning lines from any play,

except perhaps Shakespeare and other literary greats,

is seen as a hobby. Fundamental to good teaching of

the arts is this aspect of discipline, which somehow

seems to repeatedly get ignored. Most drama lessons

start with Trust Games, where the right atmosphere for

safe and happy learning is created. In my work as a

drama teacher and arts practitioner, I have seen thesegames transform hostility into co-operation as if by

magic.

Until the National Curriculum was introduced in 1986,

art, music, drama and dance all existed as discrete

subjects on school timetables. There were drama

departments with heads and deputy heads of drama

and it held a rightful, equal place in the scheme of

things, albeit with lower status than science and

maths. But with the focus on you could call it

worship of technology and the subsequent

integration of drama (back into English) and dance

(thrown carelessly into P.E.), things for the arts started

to slip backwards and have been slipping ever since.As Ken Robinson says, no one ever came out of a

production of Swan Lake and asked who won.

In terms of arts education and PRUs, it is possible,

with the vision and commitment of senior managers,

to keep things going. Music education is common in

PRUs and is one of the ways of ensuring good

attendance. I have had particular success with drama.

In 1992, while working at another PRU for truanting

young people, we put on a small end-of-year

performance. One of the students, Jacinta, wastransformed by the experience and was inspired to

continue her education, receiving high grade

vocational qualifications in the performing arts. At her

National Record of Achievement celebration, Jacintas

mother took my hand and thanked me for saving her

life.

Arts Education and the PRU the power of

creative education.

In his study of emotional intelligence, Daniel Goleman

included the results of a major survey of pupils and

teachers in the United States and beyond. It shows a

worldwi de trend for the present generat ion of childrento be more troubled emotionally than the last: more

lonely and depressed, more angry and unruly, more

nervous and prone to worry, more impulsive and

aggressive.3

The arts can be transformational for individual

students and can, thanks to organisations like Creative

Partnerships, provide entire institutions with new and

rewarding opportunities. Creative Partnerships is an

innovative government-funded initiative, established

to develop schoolchildrens potential, ambition,

creativity and imagination. It achieves this by building

substantial partnerships that impact upon learning

between schools, creative and cultural organisationsand individuals.4





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would later express themselves in poetr y workshops

with Adisa. Performance Poet Jonzi D and musician

Kew helped put the six poets work to music. They

then recorded them in a professional recording studio.

Music videos were created and filmed in differentlocations in Hackney, while a different group started

learning Capoeira a martial arts discipline. Food

Technology is a very popular subject and four one

minute cooking sequences were included in the final

film.

At f irst the students ignored Eelyn i n the way that they

will ignore teachers. But after a while and in response

to the high quality arts workshops, they started to

engage with her. The one main advantage she and the

artists had was that they werent teachers so it was

cool for the young people to co-operate with them.

Eelyn commented to me that she was amazed at the

difference between the interviews filmed at the end ofthe project compared to those done at the start. She

had succeeded in creating trust that most difficult

commodity and the openness of the students

interviews provides touching and thoughtful moments

in the film.

Beneath the Hoodpremiered at a screening for the

Daniel House community (parents, students and staff)

at the National Film Theatre, the leading venue in

London for arthouse films. After the screening, one

mother who I had had to spend considerable time

with persuading to stay, told me she would go home

and treat her son differently from now on. When I

asked her why, she said because she could see thingsfrom his point of view for the first time, instead of

being caught up in her own pain at the way she saw

things. One girl astounded us all with the depth and

maturity of her poem,which was one of the gems of

the film. She had hardly spoken while she had been a

student at Daniel House. Her performance of the

poem in the film increased her status and gained her a

very real respect. She has now fully reintegrated into a

mainstream school. Her chorus was:

Thrown in this place

And it feels so wrong

But now I have to accept

Dis is where I belong

Anoth er girl student who impressed a ll of us with her

intelligence, commitment and articulacy says:

When the boys throw

Verbal grenades

I diffuse them quickly

I never get fazed

This student achieved seven GCSE passes (final exams

taken at age 16) and has moved on to a good further

education college to continue her studies.

One of the boys had written a poem entitled My

Father, which had people weeping in the audience:

Families need their fathers

Like flowers need water

You were the bricks

And we were the mortar.6

The film was shown to large audiences at other venues

and to an audience of government ministers; future

screenings for invited audiences are planned. In

addition, a DVD will be available for sale.

There is now, thankfully, a strong, detailed and

growing body of research both in the UK and

internationally that confirms the value of arts

education within both mainstream and out-of-school

education. It is widely accepted that the arts have a

key role to play in developing a young persons sense

of self worth and confidence. Excluded young people

have no difficulty expressing their primary feelingswhich for many tend, sadly, to be aggress ion and

violence. They need the tools to learn to control these

emotions and the discipline to think before they

express them inappropriately. The arts, as many case

studies and research studies confirm, provide these

tools.





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At the s tart of the twenty-f irst century, young people

have developed their own fashion, language and

culture as young people throughout time have done,

only it seems that the output of some oftodaysyouth

represents real anger and disaffection, which has theeffect of alienating the wider society in which schools

function. Street culture and many of its attendant

features (hoods up, trousers down, faces covered etc.)

is anathema to a safe, happy school environment.

These factors can contribute to a student being

permanently excluded from school and ending up at a

PRU.

Summary

Alchemy: from the negative to the positive

What has become clearer and clearer to me after

working i n four PRUs in inner London is that

education for these vulnerable and difficult youngpeople isa matter of life and death. It is that serious.

The healing power of the arts lies in the way we use

The International Journal on School Disaffection Trentham Books 200436





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them to reflect upon the issues of our lives. They give

us pause time to look in the mirror and take stock.

Will arts education stop the murders and assaults that

young people run the gauntlet of daily from

happening? Of course not. But it could be one strategyfor tackling the vicious downward spiral of negativity

from spreading throughout the whole education

system.

The arts have a major role to play in ameliorating

some of the alienation and aggression that young

people bring into schools. If we deny this and do not

give the necessary status and resources to the arts in

schools, we will be missing a real opportunity to tackle

the disaffection afflicting so many young people in

inner city London, New York, Paris, Johannesburg and

elsewhere. There is no other area of the curriculum

that touches todays youth in the way the arts do.

We must let young people in our schools have some

fun and laugh again. We must acknowledge the power

of the self-discipline that the arts teach, the need for

commitment and stick-to-it-iveness. Arts education

must be given its rightful place and status at the heart

of any curriculum offered in any school. Only then do

we have a chance of reclaimi ng the h earts and minds

of this generation and the next and the next.

References1 Guidance on Pupil Referral Units: www.dfes.gov.uk

2 Out of our Minds; Ken Robinson Capstone 2001

3 D. Goleman, Emotional Intelligence, Bloomsbury, London, 1996

A report in 1999 by the Mental Health Foundation, The Big

Picture, gives graphic evidence of this among children at

school.

4 Snapshots(Issue Three, Summer 2004). Article on Beneath the

Hood. Creative Partnerships London East.

5 Press Release for Beneath the Hood, CP London East

6 Extracts from the Daniel House Programme: Beneath the Hood

7 PRU web-site: http://www.prus.org.uk

ContactsDaniel House, Clissold Road, London N16 9EX

E-Mail: [email protected]

Eelyn Lee: [email protected]

Creative Partnerships London East: londoneast@creative-

partnerships.com

AcknowledgementsFilm Stills: Beneath the Hood, produced by Eelyn Lee

Productions.

Photographs : Courtesy of Stephanie Gill.



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