Advocating for cultural education for young people in our city

We are coming up to the end of our second phase of work now, so here is a recap on our work so far and our plans for the future: 

Creative Education in Leeds Schools

The project was born out of evaluation activities around the LEEDS 2023 Year of Culture, and the need for a baseline to compare against when measuring the impact of the programme. It has evolved since then, into an initiative to advocate for cultural education for all young people in the city. 

In the first phase, Briony and her team sent out a pilot survey to all of the schools in Leeds to understand their creative offering for students. The survey included questions on the arts curriculum, facilities, trips, career opportunities and relationships with creative practitioners. This served as a pilot study to gauge interest and validate the approach.

This year, Briony and her team launched a second survey covering the academic year 2022/23. We supported them with their analysis, generating an automated pipeline to process responses to the survey and visualise the key findings on a new dashboard.

You can view their Phase 2 survey results on the microsite. 

The survey saw a better turnout this year, which tells us that the project is gaining traction and we're looking forward to seeing how creative engagement will evolve in Leeds post-LEEDS 2023 and beyond.

LEEDS 2023 Legacy Dashboard 

In this phase, we wanted to highlight the engagements that took place throughout LEEDS 2023 with children and young people in Leeds schools.

We developed a new LEEDS 2023 Legacy Dashboard, which presents key headlines on the impact of the programme, particularly for children and young people. Here you can see where the programme's engagements took place across Leeds, and how many young people took part in its activities. 

This helps us to not only visualise the immediate impact of the Year of Culture, but also to frame responses to the survey. Has the level of creative engagement and arts provision in Leeds schools changed as a result of the programme? Are there barriers that prevent schools from making the most out of culture programmes? The data will go some way to answering these questions. 

City of Leeds Dashboard

Research is indicating that adult attendance and engagement of creative activities is on the steady decline, due to a number of factors such as cost-of-living, lifestyle changes and post-pandemic recovery of the arts and events industry. Deprioritisation and funding cuts to national arts education initiatives has also led to a 42% decline in arts GCSE entries in UK state-funded schools. 

Programmes such as the Year of Culture are therefore needed now more than ever, to supplement and support the curriculum while engaging directly with young people, giving them chance to explore their aspirations and consider if a creative career is right for them.

We wanted a place to present these statistics, as a means to set the context for why this research is needed but also to start exploring how Leeds specifically compares to the national picture. How many people are opting for arts GCSE subjects in Leeds, compared with the rest of the UK? Is the decline greater or lesser than the national average, and how is this changing over time?

We also wanted to understand the unique makeup of Leeds' population, and the options that are available to them locally for engaging with the arts. Which wards have a greater proportion of young people? Where are the creative practitioners, studios, event spaces, musicians and workshops that they can get involved with? What are the barriers that young people might be facing to engaging with culture?

We presented these data on a City of Leeds Dashboard, that aims to set the context of this work and start answering some of these questions. 

Organisations & Practitioners

Throughout the last two phases of the project, we've been building a database of cultural practitioners in Leeds. We've categorised these practitioners into groups, based on the type of engagement they provide. You can see this data on the Organisations page. 

This will enable schools to visit this page and find the creative practitioners who are offering the type of engagement they need, whether that be training and development, musicians, workshops, performances or signposting and information.

Cultural data

We've also developed a Data Catalogue, where the data sources used across the site will be linked and downloadable, all in one place. We've done this elsewhere, including our work for LEEDS 2023, as our aim is to make this data as accessible as possible so that others can download, use and share it for their own purposes. 

The first datasets to be included in the Catalogue are shown below. 

Next Steps: 

We are developing the data microsite into a tool designed to serve multiple purposes:

• For schools: Find, contact and build partnerships with creative practitioners who can provide creative education and enrichment for their students through a variety of artforms. 
• For cultural organisations: Understand the Leeds creative ecosystem to inform their outreach to the schools and areas that are seeking new partnerships.
• For residents: Discover new practitioners and opportunities to get involved.
• For researchers and policymakers: Leverage and improve the data to support the growth and sustainability of Leeds' cultural sector, and advocate for cultural education for young people

In the next phase, we'll focus on turning the website into a resource for schools and creative practitioners to find each other and develop new, long-term partnerships for delivering arts and creative education. 

We'll be building on the Organisations map and expanding this database to include more practitioners and refining how we define engagement types. Our goal is to expand this nationally, so if you are interested, would benefit from this data or are working in this space - get in touch with us. 

We'll also be running a third survey, building on the responses from the previous years and conducting meta-analysis to compare how arts provision is changing over the years. 

The City of Leeds Dashboard will see a lot of new data added, examining the GCSE and A Level arts curriculum in more detail, and exploring post-secondary progression and employment in the arts and creative industries. 

The Data Catalogue will be developed further into a comprehensive data resource for researchers and enthusiasts to download and work with the data themselves. 

Get involved 

As always, we welcome you to get in touch with us if you have questions, comments or feedback on the project so far. Or, just tell us what you've been up to at hello@open-innovations.org. 

We're excited to continue our work with Briony and to see how the microsite develops in the year ahead. Congratulations to Briony and her team on their success establishing Leeds33, which we recommend you follow on X and LinkedIn to keep up with their developments.