The text was commissioned by Pool School Gallery, Cornwall. It explores the role and importance of arts and creativity in education. The project is supported by English Heritage and The Royal Society of Chemistry. Reading time 20'

         In the summer of 2024, the artist Jonty Lees and I discussed a project he led at a secondary school in Pool, Cornwall, placing artists in collaboration with pupils. Lees invited me to write something to accompany the project, influenced by my experience of growing up in Cornwall and my ongoing commitment to art education. In one exchange, he emailed me a postcard he gifted his graduating art students at Falmouth School of Art. The image depicts a goal frame Lees crafted for his son. Emblazoned across the crossbar is the message: ‘Del Piero, pass the ball’, a playful nod to the silky-skilled but slightly selfish Italian footballer Alessandro Del Piero. An accompanying note, written for his students, explains that it was the item he most enjoyed making that year. Being an artist isn’t just about prizes and acclaim, Lees explains; it is about a life well-lived, making things of beauty and purpose.

Purpose is defined here in its most fundamental sense: something that gives meaning to somebody. Let us put it another way: a painting won’t open a tin of baked beans, but making a bloody great big mess can offer a portal to a different and more colourful world. It strikes me that Lees’ provocation perfectly encapsulates the importance of arts education, modelled in his work in Pool.

 I am writing this article amid shifting sands. After years of vandalism and neglect, a new Labour government has initiated a much-needed curriculum review. There is a measured and cautious optimism. Every week, a new policy report, open letter, or article offers a hot take on the importance of creativity in early years development.

Each generation finds a way of saying the same thing slightly differently. These perennial polemics from the cultural sector are love letters pleading for broader reciprocity. Talking about the fundamental importance of arts in education can feel like repeating ourselves: arguments made 40 years ago are heard but not heeded. So, let’s start with this: everything good in the world needs repeating. Love is nourished through declarative repetition. This is my love letter written in response to Lees’ request to express what it means to live a well-lived life, making things of beauty and purpose. An invitation to make a bloody great big mess. An open call to put your hands in wet clay.

The questions, context and answers change, but the message remains the same: art matters as a tool for self-definition, self-determination and exploration. The arts set the values for civil society, connecting us to collective and personal histories. And yet, we have a curious amnesia when it comes to supporting creativity. The UK faces an unprecedented crisis in cultural provision at every level. Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future (2023) by the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation revisits and updates Ken Robinson’s influential report on arts education published in 1982. The findings articulate that, despite isolated visionary and inspirational practices, arts in schools are in peril, with young people facing a creativity crisis witnessed by systemic underfunding and outright political hostility. Take your pick: course closures, redundancies, restructuring, and denigration of arts and humanities subjects across the education spectrum. The recent report State of the Arts, 2024, published by Campaign for the Arts and The University of Warwick paints a similarly bleak picture. GCSE arts provision has halved in the last 10 years alone. Pupils in the poorest areas are least likely to access arts provision. This is despite much evidence and advocacy supporting the crucial role of arts as a full spectrum subject that champions complexity, creativity, resilience, inclusivity, and independent enquiry, fundamental skills to a thriving, inclusive society. 

Labour’s recent landslide after 14 years of Conservative government offers a mandate for change, and it feels like a prescient moment to advocate for the arts, consider what they bring to an educational environment, and insist on their primacy in education at all levels.

So, why does art matter? What do the arts bring to a learning environment? How do we learn differently? These questions are central to the activity of Pool School Gallery, a gallery and arts programme run by Lees at Pool Academy in Cornwall.

The summer 2024 programme convened artists Emma Pearson, David Paton, Nina Royle, Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Simon Bayliss, Bram Arnold, Rosanna Martin, Charlie Duck and Holly Sproul to explore young people’s interest in chemistry and heritage via workshops culminating in an exhibition by artists and year 7 students. Pupils have built a wood-fired kiln and smashed up granite blocks with hammers the size of their own bodies. They’ve walked at the pace of minerals and explored the sonic properties of tin. They sang a haunting version of Zombie by the Cranberries, beatboxed to The White Stripes and made flying squirrels out of clay. They have pondered ecological deep time through the materialism of crisp packets and had, by all accounts, a lot of fun.

The programme encapsulates Pool School Gallery’s ambition, putting artists in direct contact with young people. It offers an embedded, transdisciplinary arts education model, culminating in an exhibition co-curated with the young people at Pendennis Castle and Pool School Gallery. Meeting the artists online, they discuss ‘finding value in the margins’ and ‘creating space for equitable conversation’. Trust is frequently mentioned, enabling pupils to ‘go off piste’ and ‘discover at their own pace.’ 

Taken collectively, the project offers a joyous account of why art matters as a space of incidental encounter pursuing beautiful and purposeful collaboration. The artists’ involvement in Pool School Gallery’s programme generates discussion on their own education and early artistic encounters. Listening to these accounts reminds me of my own creative journey, which was nourished by an early, serendipitous encounter.

Allow me to digress briefly. I landed in Cornwall at age ten and spent my teenage years living in a small village called Indian Queens, about 20 miles up the road from Pool. I went to school in Newquay and remember sitting in deathless classes in freezing and leaking portacabins. I was an average student. Art and English were my favourite subjects, topics that, while I didn’t understand at the time, foregrounded the open-ended enquiry I pursued in my career.

These were largely happy years. I spent the summer holidays playing football and Playstation. Adidas Gazelles. Oasis on repeat. Topman checkered shirt. It was the Nineties. Give me a break. I had no understanding of art and had never even met an artist. My mum is into history and gardens, and we often visited National Trust sites, which I loved.

Around 14, I developed a friendship group with a boy called Henry Darke, and I’d go around his house at the weekend and camp on the beach. This led to two formative experiences. Henry introduced me to alternative music and the music magazine NME, gateway drugs into a cultural life, which still sustain me. His mum and dad were the artist Jane Darke and playwright Nick Darke. Visiting their house was like entering another world with shelves of books and walls lined with paintings. They listened to (and wrote for) Radio 4 and read the Guardian.

Nick would often kindly drive my friends and me home and, on one occasion, asked us what we’d like to do with our lives. While art was my favourite subject, I replied that I was unsure what career to choose. Nick, looking perplexed, said that if art was my favourite topic, why wouldn’t I want to be an artist? He told me to look at Falmouth College of Art and that living a life well-lived and making things of beauty and purpose was difficult but possible. You could. Whisper it. Even earn money. 

It has taken me years of teaching to understand that permission is the most crucial thing you can impart to someone. Permission grants a permit to possibility. A licence to roam, to be yourself. Nick’s permission blew my teenage mind wide open. I spent the next few years reading everything I could on art and music, growing my hair, and dressing like Jarvis Cocker before applying to study on the Foundation course at Falmouth College of Art. I learned that existentialism wasn’t a fizzy drink. I found out that Raphael wasn’t a Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtle. My life changed. Forever.

My introduction to art was serendipitous. A chance encounter amid a boozy teenage camping trip. The car journey was my ground zero moment, saving me from a less fulfilling life. My secondary school did very little to support my aspirations. The career advisor was actively hostile when I dared to suggest that I wanted to attend art school. I was incredibly lucky (and very stubborn) that there was a support mechanism — free Foundation courses and, later, bursaries and scholarships — that enabled my fragile ambitions. Many of these pathways no longer exist. Would I even get to art school now? I’m not so sure. 

While serendipity makes a cute story, it’s not a strategy. It is a stroke of luck. In learning differently and learning to live differently, I think back to my experience. I’ve spent my career trying to systemise what is often left to privilege, ensuring that everyone has the opportunity for such formative encounter. It is this ambition that articulates Pool School Gallery’s vision. Putting artists in schools creates generative encounters that have long-term legacies. I’m not advocating that everyone studying art should develop a career in the art world. For me, the question is larger: how can artistic thinking help us live more fulfilled and enriched lives? How can more people access the pursuit of making beautiful and purposeful things?

In writing this love letter to arts education, I’m striking a claim for creativity across all subjects. All good teaching and learning is, at heart, creative.

Making things of beauty and purpose…

I’ve told you about some of my backstory and reflected on the importance of serendipitous encounters. Still, I’d like to go a little deeper and outline some core concepts that illustrate why the work of Pool School Gallery is so essential. The developmental psychologist Margaret Donaldson coined the term disembedded learning to describe how topics such as maths, languages and science are often isolated and taught out of context. In essence, many of us make sense of experiences through connection, acquiring knowledge through applying abstract ideas to real-world and tactile contexts. By emphasising abstract disconnected learning, we disengage people who make sense of the world through visual metaphors and materials. In education, we often privilege and valorise verbal dexterity. This extends into work environments where leadership and dynamism are often a cypher for conversational mastery. 

Speed of thought is allied to strength of vision, and these biases are formed in systems that marginalise a range of personality types. Our professional environments repeat the problems of our educational system: mono-modal intellectual environments lead to a mono-cultural values system that hampers social diversity. People think differently, yet the educational structures we move through persist in neurotypical structures that smother difference and cater to a small percentage. By privileging disembedded learning, we cultivate a feeling of failure and alienation in those who don’t fit the standard educational routes. In this sense, the arts are context, embodying and embedding the body’s sensorial experience of the world, privileging alternate visual, bodily and material forms of knowledge. From surgeons improving their skills through piano playing to opera singers helping NHS patients with respiratory disease, we can see the application of fine motor skills and haptic knowledge across society.

Increasingly, research evidence how the arts also rewire our brains and physically impact our bodies. At a time when we’re living through a mental health crisis, especially among young people, the arts can help build skills towards a more humane society that privileges the whole.

The neuroscientist Marian Diamond discovered, via a series of experimentations in the Seventies, that humans working in texturally, sonically and aesthetically enriched environments develop additional brain tissue around part of the cerebral cortex associated with cognitive processing. In privileging STEM subjects (science, technology, engineering and maths) we’ve rushed to remove the body from learning environments. In removing the body, we lose a significant part of our sensory field: smell, touch, and hearing, inputs that unconsciously unlock parts of our brain in ways we barely understand.

For instance, doodling has been shown to aid memory retention. Telling stories builds resilience to change and uncertainty. Acting empowers empathy and ethical play. Making things reduces the stress hormone cortisol. Music releases chemicals in the body, which have many positive physiological and psychological effects. Tests have revealed that raised levels of the feel-good hormone oxytocin are found in people after singing and dancing.

The arts change the physicality of our bodies and minds, encouraging holistic learning, thinking through feeling, and knowledge through making. In thinking about why art matters, I come to the more pressing question: how can it not? To slightly misuse a phrase by the educational theorist Ken Robinson, we start learning by playing in the sandpit and end it at a desk at a Microsoft Teams meeting. This learning trajectory has profoundly adverse effects on mental health and diminishes social diversity by privileging a small minority of thinkers. We need more artistic thinking. Not less of it. We need more Pool School Gallery.

Crucially, relaxed minds learn more, and it is this personal transformation that leads to collective change. Creativity and open-ended enquiry create new synaptic connections that aid cognitive plasticity. This is basically a fancy way of saying that the arts empower intellectual agility, the ability to see things from different sides. We are besieged by platforms that engender binarism and false authority. We urgently need to cultivate complexity and critical thinking in our learning environments to challenge political populism and technological manipulation. In living a life well-lived, making things of beauty and purpose, we need to learn differently and to learn to live differently. I believe we need to find generative and less structured ways to connect. We need to cultivate more spaces for serendipitous encounters.

By modelling embedded learning through artistic enquiry, Pool School Gallery responds to the question: Why does art matter? With the response: imagine a world without art.  

In 1998, Chris Smith, the newly appointed Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport, commissioned a mapping document that popularised the term ‘creative industries’ to frame culture’s economic and placemaking potential. Replacing culture for creativity suggested a modern and inclusive approach, broadening the arts' responsibilities to encompass job creation, tourism, and economic investment, further expanding into community cohesion and well-being. The economist Justin O’Connor has written that this conflation of culture (creativity) with industry has led to the sector’s current precarity. O’Connor argues that economic articulations for the arts can be dangerous. We must move cultural provision into social and civic infrastructure to protect it as an inalienable human right.

Making things of beauty and purpose should be open to all. It is part of the ingredients that lead to a life well-lived: not a supplement but an essential tool in negotiating complexity with empathy and humanity.

So, here I end my love letter to art education—my love letter to errancy, messiness, play, serendipity and conversation. This one is for Pool School Gallery, a place which systematises chance encounters and cultivates faith in open enquiry.

To the artists Emma Pearson, David Paton, Nina Royle, Amy and Oliver Thomas-Irvine, Simon Bayliss, Bram Arnold, Rosanna Martin, Charlie Duck, Holly Sproul and Jonty Lees, I say: continue making things with beauty and purpose. To curators, I say: embrace artists. To politicians, I say: embrace complexity. To teachers, I say: learn from your students. To students, I say: listen to your teachers. To my 14-year-old self, I say: don’t listen to the career advisor: the path ahead is challenging and precarious, but a life well-lived, making things of beauty and purpose, is worth it. To Jonty Lees, I say: thank you!

 Further Reading:

The Arts in Schools: Foundations for the Future (2023) Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation.

Magsamen, S & Ross,I  (2023) Your Brain on Art: How the Arts Transform Us, Canongate Books, Edinburgh.

Grandin, T  (2022) Visual Thinking: The Hidden Gifts of People Who Think in Pictures, Patterns and Abstractions. Rider, London.

O’Connor, J (2024) Culture is not an Industry. Manchester University Press, Manchester.

Donaldson, M (1986) Children’s Minds. Harper Perennial, New York.

Campaign for the Ats & University of Warwick (2024) The State of the Arts, Campaign for the Arts & Centre for Culture and Media Policy Studies, University of Warwick.