Dr Steph Hawke, Head of Learning and Impact at Curious Minds, frames the value of artist educators – or Teaching Artists – within the context of the fundamental purposes of schooling and the needs of young people and their future employers. Curious Minds is taking this thinking forward through a partnership with Goldsmiths, University of London, and through becoming the England Hub of the International Teaching Artists Collaborative (ITAC).
Teaching Artists
The concept of the Teaching Artist was developed in the 1970s at New York’s Lincoln Center and since then has gained international momentum through the International Teaching Artists Collaborative (ITAC). A Teaching Artist works at the intersection of the arts and education, bringing professional practice into the classroom and showing up as both pedagogue and artist in equal measure. In England, Curious Minds is proud to act as the national ITAC Hub, helping to grow this movement and connect it internationally.
Tightening budgets and narrowing of the curriculum in response to initiatives like the English Baccalaureate (EBacc), have stifled the ability of schools to work with Teaching Artists. Meanwhile the arts sector is increasingly pressured to prove its value in terms of evidence and hard data. It is in this context that Curious Minds has partnered with our colleagues at Goldsmiths, University of London, to collaboratively supervise PhD candidate Saul Argent to investigate the impact of Teaching Artists in schools. The PhD is co-supervised by Dr Diana Omigie and Prof Alice Jones Bartoli.
Our goal is to understand not just the impact Teaching Artists deliver, but how they achieve it. The research uses the lens of psychology to explore how artists create the pedagogical circumstances within which young people develop character and qualities: curiosity, creativity, identity and belonging. The team at Goldsmiths has developed a toolkit comprising psychometric testing, qualitative approaches and co-produced evaluation methods that will support data collection.
This work feels especially timely. In April, the National Curriculum and Assessment review published its Interim Report (see the CLA response here). In parallel the government set out proposals for a new enrichment framework and a National Centre for Arts and Music Education. Potentially these offer glimmers of hope amid the stark decline in arts education laid bare in the CLA’s 2025 Report Card.
Cultural education and the vision for schools
Alongside the Curriculum and Assessment Review, reviews of Ofsted, and of Arts Council England are also underway, creating a moment for national reflection. What if we asked not just how cultural education is offered in this country, but why?
The education discourse rightly focuses on raising standards and attainment but what is the vision? What are schools for? What kind of future are young people being prepared for? What kind of society are we aiming to shape?
Peter Hyman, founder of School 21, has described young people as “a nation’s umbilical cord to a better future”.1 It’s a powerful metaphor. So, what are we incubating? How far are we supporting young people to grow into active citizens, with rewarding interior lives, and characters shaped by curiosity, creativity, and resilience?
The focus on a knowledge-rich curriculum at Key Stages 3 and 4 seems to have narrowed efforts toward a single goal: the memorisation of thousands of words of syllabus content for unrelenting testing. This has been to the detriment of group-work, discussion, inquiry and curiosity-led project-work.
It is an approach that may well have improved the nation’s PISA scores, but at what cost? Particularly when employers say they want to recruit young people with ‘something about them,’ some quality of character that goes beyond a page of exam scores.2
Today’s young people will live in a world already facing unprecedented challenges: rapid technological change, environmental collapse, and an erosion of democracy. These demands require more than knowledge: they require judgement, ethics, imagination, creativity, resilience and courage.
We need a curriculum that more intentionally teaches these qualities. How can we expect young people to thrive in a world shaped by AI if we don’t actively teach them how to use it as a tool? How can they navigate misinformation and polarisation if we don’t support them to engage critically?
In what educationalist Professor Robin Alexander has described as the “raucous free-for-all of social media”, critical debate and oracy cannot be an exclusive luxury for fee-paying schools, but a democratic necessity.3 The pioneering work of School 21 and the frameworks provided by Voice 21 offer a blueprint of the school as an arena for ethical debate. As Peter Hyman has said, young people must urgently learn how to agreeably disagree.4
The Answer is the arts
Creativity. Communication. Character. These are not extra-curricular, they are essential. I would like to argue that the answer to the issues laid out above lies with arts-based learning and Teaching Artists. The arts offer another way to understand and another language to connect. They provide purpose, application, meaning and resonance.
Artists who work in schools bring more than a technical specialism, they offer new ways of seeing and being. They create a different context and climate for talk about challenging issues. Through conversation, experimentation, and by making space to critically review, redraft or rework, artists nurture not just character qualities like curiosity, but also resilience and perseverance. Project-based learning, where young people work towards a final creative product, exhibition or performance, can help pupils to make sense of curriculum content in purposeful and engaging ways.
Curious Minds is committed to working alongside CLA and our partners at Goldsmiths and ITAC to better understand and advocate for the role of the Teaching Artist, and for cultural education more broadly. CLA is building an evidenced Capabilities Framework that can support schools and cultural organisations to develop, evaluate and make the case for cultural education. CLA has also been working with the Royal Shakespeare Company, with funding from Bloomberg Philanthropies, on a feasibility study for an arts learning Evidence Hub.
As we look to the future, we must continue to ensure policy and practice are grounded in evidence. Artist-led education is not ‘enrichment’; we must counter the rhetoric of ‘nice to have’. It is needed, and central to what a truly inclusive, enjoyable, and future-facing education system should provide.
Image – Curious Minds: Rhyme & Reason
