The Arts in Schools - Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation

and many others have done so since. The report is now commonly quoted inthe curriculum statements of primary and secondary schools and of localeducation authorities, and is a standard text on many teacher training courses.The Arts Council of Great Britain and Regional Arts Associations have usedThe Arts in Schools as a basis in developing education policies and programmesinvolving artists and schools.Why was the report received with such enthusiasm? It was partly because itcaught a mood and addressed anxieties which many people inside and outsideeducation were feeling. So far as policy-makers outside arts education wereconcerned, the impact of the report was increased because we were not makinga special plea for the arts at a time when curricular self-defence was a naturalreflex. On the contrary, the principal argument is that the arts represent aconception of general education which was seriously at risk in the politicalpreoccupation with economic imperatives. We related these arguments to theprevailing political agenda showing that this approach to education was morenot less important in changing social and economic circumstances.The report was well received by arts educators for the same reasons and forputting the case strongly on their behalf. But in presenting the case for thearts to policy-makers we also wanted to offer a particular view of the issuesto practitioners. The report did not set out to offer a new theory of artseducation, but it did attempt a new synthesis. We were concerned that somearts practice in schools was locked into a limited conception of individualdevelopment through creative self-expression that ignored or marginalised theequal importance of developing critical and technical skills in the arts and agrowing understanding of other people's work. The cultural dimension of artseducation is discussed in Chapter 3 and is a theme of growing importance.The report has not been without its critics, of course, and there are someserious omissions. In particular it does not deal with the implications for artseducation of developments in film and television nor with related issues inmedia education. It deals in a little detail with the concept of creativity, butmuch less fully with the concept of aesthetic development. These importantissues have been taken up in other publications.The publication of The Arts in Schools stimulated a wide variety of practicalprojects, many with the support of the Gulbenkian Foundation. Cheshireeducation authority sent copies of the report to all schools and followed thisup with in-service courses and its own book of good practice, Visions andIdeas (Penn 1985). Warwickshire established an Arts in Schools project toenhance the arts in the curricula of a pilot group of secondary schools anddisseminated the results across the county. A conference to discuss the reportorganised in 1984 by the London Association of Arts Centres led to a jointenquiry with ILEA, GLC and Greater London Arts and to a detailed reporton Arts, Education and Community (MacDonald 1987).In 1985 the National Foundation for Educational Research (NFER) respondedto our call for a national review of the arts in teacher training and publishedits own major report on this subject (Cleave and Sharp 1986). Subsequentlythe NFER undertook a detailed survey and evaluation of the roles of artistsxiii