A future beyond Voices for the Future

Published: 10 June 2024 
Author: Steve Medlin 
Six teachers take part in an arts-based continuing professional development session in a school assembly hall with a wooden floor.
Voices for the Future. Photo credit: Collage Arts

As Voices for the Future enters its final few weeks, Steve Medlin, Artistic Director of Collage Arts, reflects on their TDF learning journey working with teachers and senior leaders from six primary schools in the London borough of Haringey.

In the blink of an eye, it is almost over. Voices for the Future, part of the Round 5 cohort of TDF funding is near the end of our two-year project that has focused on embedding creative and anti-racist practice in six primary schools across the borough of Haringey. 

We aimed to build the skills, knowledge and confidence of teachers working in primary settings so that they may not only feel comfortable in using the arts in their classrooms but also potentially across their schools with the ultimate golden goal of training their peers in using the same techniques.

We don’t get a drama side to our teacher training at university, so it has been really nice for this to come later on in our professional development. I’ve found it very useful – eye-opening.”

Teacher, Alexandra Primary School 

Our approach was to treat each school as an individual entity, understanding that schools have their own characters and ethos, due to multiple factors, for example, their size, their location, and their communities. From previous experience in our schools’ work, we created a flexible framework within our project to best serve these schools, some of which are in underserved areas of our borough. 

We placed an artist of different creative disciplines, according to the needs of the schools, into their communities for two years to work directly with specific teachers, mostly in Year 3. They would work for weekly half-day sessions in the first year, moving to fortnightly half-day sessions in the second year, taking more of a step back at this point to allow the teacher to take centre stage and lead lessons.

Challenges

A two-year project is relatively short-term but even so, we knew that we would need to be prepared for artists, teachers, and SLT in schools moving on or to different aspects of work. Of the six schools, two continued with the same artist/​teacher combinations into the second year, whereas all others changed one or the other, and in one case both. On the one hand, this posed an issue of continuity, whilst on the other it gave more artists and teachers an experience of the project.

A group of teachers sit on chairs in a circle in a rehearsal hall with a concrete floor and dark grey walls.
Voices for the Future. Photo credit: Collage Arts

Another major challenge has been in creating a shared understanding of what anti-racism is and how this can be brought into the classroom. We quickly realised we needed specific CPD sessions on this bringing together both artists and teachers. We had three sessions, which developed iteratively: the first on what anti-racism was; the second on what best practice could look like and responses from children to sessions, and finally, looking at specific examples of how to approach lesson planning and research material, being aware of non-Western sources and focusing on more child-led strategies to give each individual agency and part-ownership of their learning using their own experiences. This latter strand felt freeing to teachers, and they commented on the increased engagement within classrooms.

This has given us [teachers] so many skills and has allowed us to think beyond the classroom walls.” 

Teacher, West Green Primary School 

Continuation and sustainability

Even though TDF is focused on embedding practice, there is always a challenge to ensure continuity once the finance is no longer there to underpin ongoing development.

Schools, as we all know, are under immense pressure, and so the question we have posed ourselves in our project is how can we build sustainability in our project, in the teachers and schools involved and potentially beyond?

How we are embedding practice and going beyond:

  • One teacher has become drama lead across the school.
  • Teachers leading their own CPD within inset days with colleagues to deliver wider dissemination. 
  • Doubling up delivery where year one teachers are working with artists on developing new teachers in year two. 
  • Final performance at Ally Pally galvanised project with teachers taking the lead in platforming the work. 
  • We filmed all participants, teachers, artists, young people, and SLT for their views on the project and made this available to all schools. 

We are passionate about this project and what it has released and enabled in teachers and their classrooms. We are already seeking further funding and have secured an amount to continue running termly CPD for both primary and secondary school teachers at Collage Arts to further develop creative and good practice.

No headshot
Artistic Director of Collage Arts