F rom the imposing and angular glass and steel Turner Contemporary gallery to the retro charms of the restored Dreamland amusement park, the Margate seafront is enjoying a revival. But visitors arriving this week will see four attractions that have opened in neglected areas of the town often unseen by day trippers, including a woodland rollercoaster, a colourful theatre space, and a giant marble run.
What will make these special is that they are being created by pupils from four local primary schools as the culmination of an 18-month project run by Turner Contemporary called Art Inspiring Change. Set the challenge of inspiring the whole town to engage with art, the 80 children involved have designed and made the work on display, appointed artists to assist them and presented their ideas to Thanet council to gain planning permission to regenerate the sites.
People attending the town’s job centre will encounter a performance space called the Bloop created by pupils from Holy Trinity and St John’s school. They can dress up as different characters, the idea being that this might inspire them to try a new role, or simply cheer them up. One pupil, Emily, said the site was chosen because “people will be feeling sad”, while another participant, Alyssa, said “when you look at the job centre you will see all these colours”.
The project is not only about physically regenerating the town. Another goal is to boost the thinking skills, self-esteem and aspirations of the children, who also attend Northdown, Palm Bay and Salmestone schools, some of whom have struggled with traditional education. As Nikki Hildesley, the project’s coordinator, says, this is about regenerating minds as well as the environment. As another of the students, Martina, puts it: “I used to think art was just something you put on paper. Now I know you can put something of your own life experience in it.”
The children taking part are called young art leaders and took charge of the interviews to appoint an artist for each school group. Sam Curtis, an artist who took to making squid and fish prints after working as a fishmonger in Harrods while studying at Goldsmiths, University of London, impressed the children of Northdown primary school with his use of edible materials. When the project took over the gallery in June last year, he helped his group to create a huge sculpture called Breadland. “We used cocktail sticks and barbecue skewers so you could connect baps or rolls or loaves or baguettes, and hollowed out other loaves and squeezed the dough into shapes like plasticine,” he says.
One of the boys involved was on the autistic spectrum but he had been so engaged that the coordinators did not realise until they received a note from his mother. “It was … this fantastic letter saying how grateful she was,” Hildesley recalls. “Since he’d joined the programme they hadn’t seen nearly as much confrontation at home or the frustration that he’d been showing, which was a fabulous moment for us.”
Holy Trinity and St John’s primary school is the second most deprived school in Kent, according to the income deprivation affecting children index. The deputy head and inclusion manager, Angela Harding, says staff saw the project as an opportunity to tackle the barriers some pupils face, including poor attendance, low aspirations, mental health issues, low self-esteem and poor language and communication skills. So she is pleased to see significant progress by their young art leaders. “We’ve actually had two children engaged in the project who are selective mutes,” she explains. “They rarely give any answers in the classroom. They wouldn’t normally be confident enough to raise their hand. But these two girls are putting their hands up to answer questions. They are offering to participate. They are confidently talking about the art project. They’ve led assemblies at the school and they’ve been confident at speaking.”
Although pupils at Palm Bay, in the Cliftonville area of the town, are generally less deprived than at other participating schools, with just under 10% on free school meals, teachers have still noticed significant improvement in the behaviour and learning of the pupils involved. Melanie Wong, from the school, says the main change is improved confidence. “That manifests itself when they’re back in the classroom,” she says.
Teachers and gallery staff were guided to support a child-led approach to learning by the Turner’s philosopher-in-residence, Ayisha de Lanerolle. Lizzie Williams, headteacher of Palm Bay school, said two of her teachers were trained in philosophy for children at the gallery and the approach will be applied across the school over the next two years. “[It’s] teaching children to debate, to compromise, to come to a consensus, to be tolerant of one another’s ideas,” she says.
The gallery also trained 20 parents from the schools to become ‘creative enablers’, to help the children realise their ideas. As part of the training to gain a City and Guilds qualification, the trainees helped the young art leaders to organise a winter wonderland last December.
Harding says the confidence some parents have gained is incredible and Holy Trinity and St John’s has plans to incorporate aspects of the project into the curriculum. And Lizzie Williams says the project has helped Palm Bay to approach the teaching of all subjects more creatively. The school recently ran a “Steam week”, which incorporated art with science, technology, engineering and maths (Stem). “We had a resident engineer and scientist and the theme was motion.
The children made loads of things like land yachts and hot air balloons, boats.” She adds: We’re trying to move towards a much more children-led model of learning generally. I think that the wider teaching staff have seen how much success we’ve had with Art Inspiring Change and it’s encouraging us more to let go in other subject areas.”
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