Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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The economic situation has not yet affected the number of students coming to the school. Tuition will not be increased next year. In addition to a voucher, issued to all children, less-well-of parents can apply for a support regarding school fees for their children. I don’t agree that now is a bad time. Previously in Iceland we were loosing our identity, we were of track. Now is a major time for arts and craft, now is the time to break boundaries. The Reykjavík Committee for Sport and Leisure should be working with the education office. The art are fighting for the same money, the children should be at the centre, working in teams work on projects using all subjects. Interdisciplinary is the thing, to much compartmentalization... Up until now money has not been a problem. The school principal prepares the budget and a committee of parents looks at the budget. The community really supports the school so they never say no. I don’t think it is a question of money but of thinking. Art is a tool that helps you learn and understand life. Every child needs to know the basics. Local government provides considerable support for community and amateur arts. While some criticisms are made, the overall view is that the Cultural Agreement with the government is a great help. Additionally, the strong sense of community means that local companies are also helpful with donations and resources. Figure 1.6.1 shows that for the music schools (most directly impacted by local funding) there is a high level of satisfaction with funding, with 90% of respondents being very pleased or rather pleased with the cooperation with the local municipality. Figure 1.6.1: Satisfaction with the cooperation of the school and the local municipality The cost to the parents of a child attending music school can vary considerably. A typical cost is in the order of 61,500 ISK per year for 2x30min lessons a week during school terms. Most schools offer some form of family or sibling discount. This ranges between a 10-50% discount – largely dependent on the number of children (e.g. 10% for the second child up to 50% for 4 th or more children). During the parents’ focus group all the parents were concerned about the affordability of arts education. It appears that costs have risen and disposable income fallen, as this comment underlines, “The music school has become twice as expensive as it was in 2001.” In October 2005 11 an article was published on the future of art education at upper secondary level in Iceland. The article pointed to two major issues related to recent shifts in funding: By the transfer of responsibility for primary education from the state to city councils, and the resulting changes of state support for music schools, the most basic principles for providing art education have dramatically shifted – and we have yet to adapt. In that respect there are two crucial issues. The first being the funding of secondary art education that the councils previously provided, and secondly the education of exceptionally gifted students needs supplemental support. At the upper secondary level privately run art schools have very weak funding, and their position within the education system is unclear, and on the 11 Hjálmar H. Ragnarsson: Menntaskóli listanna (‘College of the Arts’) the principal director of the Icelandic Academy of the Arts. Published in Morgunbladid newspaper October 2005 24
primary level exceptional students are given support that only to a limited degree meets their abilities and needs. The senior managers of art schools and other relevant spokesmen of the arts have drawn attention to the problems associated with these discrepancies, but so far they have not suggested reasonable solutions that will constructively move the issue forward. (page 1) It may be the case – especially if economic conditions continue to tighten – that consideration may need to be given to providing additional support to those of talent whose capacity to continue their arts education may be detrimentally effected if parents can no longer afford the lessons. Conversely, other comments stress that the building of talent at a local level is helping to generate a very robust and sustainable arts environment, as this comment summarises: Many talented children are coming up because of increased resources put into arts education. Parents have been willing to pay. It is important for the Ministry to realize this and not reduce support. In a general sense, though, funding for arts education is deemed to be sufficient and there is a very high standard of facilities for the arts both within schools and more broadly within the community. Figures 1.6.2a and 1.6.2b show a relatively high level of satisfaction with the provisions of specialist arts facilities, with dance dancing recording 88% as being very or rather good facilities and music reporting 67% as being rather or very good facilities: Figure 1.6.2a: How well or poorly are the school's facilities suited for teaching (dance) Figure 1.6.2b: How well or poorly are the school's facilities suited for teaching (music) 1.7 Management ‣ Young people could be more actively involved in decision making Management of most schools and cultural institutions is through quite autonomous Board structures. These boards tend to be made up of staff, parents and community members. The voice of young people is rarely represented directly on the Board structure, though there is generally a comparatively high proportion of ‘student associations’ or similar that exist in Icelandic schools. It is unclear the extent to which the student associations provide an opportunity for shared planning and priority setting (“The teachers usually plan. We get a bit 25
Page 1 and 2: Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
Page 3 and 4: Acknowledgements This research woul
Page 5 and 6: Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
Page 7 and 8: 5.4.2 Talent developement..........
Page 9 and 10: practices, but in reality there are
Page 11 and 12: Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
Page 13 and 14: school type to which the comment re
Page 15 and 16: A future study could examine specif
Page 17 and 18: The number of pupils with a foreign
Page 19 and 20: pre-primary school teachers were so
Page 21 and 22: Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
Page 23: The conclusions from this report in
Page 27 and 28: ‣ Schools and colleges should be
Page 29 and 30: Increasingly, schools are becoming
Page 31 and 32: here, it is a good cooperation. We
Page 33 and 34: In terms of suggested improvements
Page 35 and 36: There are 300 hundred pupils in thi
Page 37 and 38: Figure 1.12.2 Accessibility of the
Page 39 and 40: e active in a range of local profes
Page 41 and 42: schools have waiting lists of child
Page 43 and 44: Going to local schools… well we t
Page 45 and 46: in theatre. The students really lov
Page 47 and 48: We had a great show. The teachers d
Page 49 and 50: lot of satisfaction out of the proc
Page 51 and 52: Chapter 2 World Benchmarking 2.1 In
Page 53 and 54: Chapter 3: Responses to quality 3.1
Page 55 and 56: Figure 3.2.1 Compulsory school coll
Page 57 and 58: In the survey, dance schools report
Page 59 and 60: The school is participating in the
Page 61 and 62: visitors. The diverse and ‘quirky
Page 63 and 64: A smaller group of girls performs a
Page 65 and 66: Figure 3.3.6 Pupil performances in
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Conversely, the accessibility of ou
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Vignette 3.7.4 Every day there are
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Despite the geographical challenges
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In visual arts we mainly assess acc
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We try to do professional developme
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This vignette from an academic in t
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in offering adult education. Other
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demanding more of our schools and t
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It was argued that the arts may not
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(teacher a professional photographe
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There is a lot of respect amongst p
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“The popularity of pop music is g
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Others would argue that the connect
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interrelationship with nature and c
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From this summary, it can be seen t
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training of senior secondary arts t
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Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
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There is a lack of connection betwe
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During the research, various school
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The following sections are other as
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For older pupils, there are electiv
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Before I came here no-one was doing
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Creative and cultural industries Mo
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While the previously listed recomme
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