Lessons from a UK/ Korea policy and practice exchange on arts and cultural education in schools.
In May 2017, the RSA began a year of work with the British Council and the Korea Arts and Culture Education Service (KACES) as part of the year-long UK/Korea festival of culture, Creative Futures. We began with a question: ‘what distinctive approaches to arts and cultural education in the UK and South Korea might be deployed to strengthen policy and practice in the other country?’ To help find answers, delegations of policymakers, academics, education leaders and artist practitioners from the UK and Korea visited the two countries, exchanging ideas and insights into how provision might improve. This report summarises the exchange and its key messages.
The report’s title, Trusted Practice, represents a mutual and wide-ranging concern about establishing and maintaining trust between the arts sector and education. It’s a concern that runs top to bottom through the sector – found in government policy, in the relationships between schools and artist practitioners and in the sector’s approach to understanding its own impact.
The issue of trust divided into three interconnected areas, explored in detail in the report:
Devolved agency to local partnerships, or how trust from the centre should support strong local arts and cultural education ecologies that can respond to local opportunities, meet local demand and improve access.
The Trusted Practitioner, or how a professional identity for artist practitioners should be rooted in the importance of building trust with schools and teachers.
Measuring what you value, or how adopting an impact management approach that honours the values of schools and the cultural sector can improve public and policy-makers’ trust in arts and cultural education.
As well as making some recommendations for KACES and for UK policy-makers, the report identifies how our project partners, the British Council, might respond to international interest in learning from the UK’s heritage and current practice in arts and cultural education.
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