Arts and Cultural Education in Iceland : Professor Anne Bamford

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are some notable ‘best practice’ models of effective working of music schools within education. In these instances, the music schools have been proactive at working with the schools, community and children and have as a result developed a core role within education and the community. A particular aspect of this permeability is the manner in which Music Schools can accommodate the access to lessons for children with special needs. This idea is pursued in more detail in the next section. 3.7 Accessibility for all ‣ Accessibility for all is a highly prized belief in Icelandic education and arts education in preschools, compulsory schools and secondary schools are overwhelming available to all and strive to meet the needs of individual children ‣ Cultural institutions should continue to make their work more broadly accessible, especially to communities located some distance from the institutions ‣ After school arts provisions espouse accessible practices, but in reality there are very few examples of music or other arts schools that make a concerted effort to be inclusive for special needs pupils Arts and cultural education is compulsory in all compulsory schools under the arts education curriculum. In most instances, the children receive well over 2 hours per week with the common picture being that a child has around 1/5 or more of the school experience in the arts. In preschools this figure can be even higher. By the time the pupil reaches around 14-15 years old, it is likely that the required arts education will decrease, but be adequately replaced by a number of popular, arts-related electives. Icelandic teenagers tend to personally choose to participate in arts activities and most schools visited had active ‘clubs’ pursuing arts related activities such as talent quests, choirs, musical performances, bands, theatre, dances, festivals and art. These additional activities were youth led and this had resulted in a high level of skills in entrepreneurship and arts marketing to occur as a side effect of these out of school activities. To encourage this youth generated activity, a number of upper secondary schools offered course credits for participation in extra curricula arts activities. Quality programmes are built around inclusivity. All people should receive high standard arts provisions across the various art forms – using a range of creative and artistic approaches. This is particularly important in relation to initiatives that aim for greater inclusion of a variety of marginalized groups. In principle, Icelandic education is very accessible to all. In particular, there is a long history of making arts and cultural education as affordable and accessible as possible. Children with special needs and from different cultural backgrounds are integrated into compulsory schools and during curriculum time, they receive equitable arts provisions. 74
Conversely, the accessibility of out-of-school provisions is far less equitable. Children from other countries seem to be less likely to attend music school, as this comment suggests: “Polish people come to work. They did not send their children to music school. So we reached out to that community. We employed a Polish teacher. A Polish priest runs a polish dance group. We work through the Polish Associations. The immigrants still though have a lower percent f participation in the music school.” This comment also shows the way local community groups may fill gaps to include people from a range of backgrounds. The church, community centres and the Red Cross appear to be especially active in this regard. Similarly, very few music schools have the capability to offer programmes for pupils with special learning needs: “Does the music school have children with disabilities? No, but we would very much like to, rarely a request from parents regarding this.” There appears to be limited specific training in arts education for special needs children. For example, figures 3.7.1a and 3.7.1b show that while 72% of music schools are willing to accept pupils with special needs, only 46% of that group have any special arrangements for these pupils. In practice, there appeared to be very few music schools where pupils with special needs received bespoke programmes or were fully catered for. Figure 3.7.1a Accepting pupils with special needs Figure 3.7.1b Catering for pupils with special needs While there appears to be a high value placed on programmes in music schools being available to all, the delivery of this aspiration may need further support, especially in training 75
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Arts and Cultural Education in Icel
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Acknowledgements This research woul
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Helga Rut Guðmundsdóttir Helgi Vi
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5.4.2 Talent developement..........
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practices, but in reality there are
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Chapter 1: Introduction and overvie
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school type to which the comment re
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A future study could examine specif
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The number of pupils with a foreign
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pre-primary school teachers were so
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Figure 1.5.3: How useful is the Nat
Page 23 and 24: The conclusions from this report in
Page 25 and 26: primary level exceptional students
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
Page 67 and 68: way the children’s artworks were
Page 69 and 70: has always been and it is 20 or 30
Page 71 and 72: ‣ Funding should encourage risk t
Page 73: music sector could be less constrai
Page 77 and 78: Vignette 3.7.4 Every day there are
Page 79 and 80: Despite the geographical challenges
Page 81 and 82: In visual arts we mainly assess acc
Page 83 and 84: We try to do professional developme
Page 85 and 86: This vignette from an academic in t
Page 87 and 88: in offering adult education. Other
Page 89 and 90: demanding more of our schools and t
Page 91 and 92: It was argued that the arts may not
Page 93 and 94: (teacher a professional photographe
Page 95 and 96: There is a lot of respect amongst p
Page 97 and 98: “The popularity of pop music is g
Page 99 and 100: Others would argue that the connect
Page 101 and 102: interrelationship with nature and c
Page 103 and 104: From this summary, it can be seen t
Page 105 and 106: training of senior secondary arts t
Page 107 and 108: Vignette 5.2.4 Our selection proces
Page 109 and 110: There is a lack of connection betwe
Page 111 and 112: During the research, various school
Page 113 and 114: The following sections are other as
Page 115 and 116: For older pupils, there are electiv
Page 117 and 118: Before I came here no-one was doing
Page 119 and 120: Creative and cultural industries Mo
Page 121 and 122: While the previously listed recomme
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