Midland’s based organisations, Arts Connect and The Mighty Creatives (TMC), are leading the way in England with a pioneering new partnership programme. Collaborate & Innovate, is supporting Virtual Schools and arts and cultural organisations in the West and East Midlands to make their activities, work and programming more attractive and accessible to children and young people in care and is researching barriers to their participation.

Over the past six months, Collaborate & Innovate, has worked with 28 Arts and Cultural organisations and eight Virtual Schools, all based in the Midlands.

Collaborate & Innovate focusses on developing the skills, knowledge and learning of those in the cultural and education sectors, strengthening their ability to work together and combining their expertise, in order to more effectively open up their organisations and work to children and young people in care.

The programme builds upon eight years of groundbreaking work and investment between Arts Connect, TMC, visionary leaders in the Midlands’ Virtual Schools network and the 12,000 children and young people in care, in our region.

The genesis of Collaborate & Innovate was Arts Council England approaching Arts Connect and TMC in 2022 to run a pilot programme with the Midland’s Virtual Schools to test and adapt Arts Council England’s Artsmark Award (an accreditation for schools’ arts and cultural provision) so that it could be expanded to Virtual Schools nationally. Following this, the Arts Council, who have a priority to grow creative opportunities for children and young people in care, commissioned Arts Connect and TMC to design a strategic programme that would provide new evidence and a range of solutions to the question: how do we better engage children in care with arts and culture?

Collaborate & Innovate started in April 2023 with 28 arts and cultural organisations taking part in the first stage of work. This first stage saw TMC deliver tailored training in trauma informed practice, inspired by their own training programme and long-standing work with care experienced children and young people. The training ensured participants developed the skills and expertise needed to work directly with Virtual Schools and children and young people in care.

The second stage of the programme is now underway with eight arts and cultural organisations, (such as Coventry Museums, Care to Dance and the Arena Theatre) partnered with a Virtual School. Together they are working on 9-month-long action research projects, investigating and generating new insights into a wide range of issues.

The research covers many areas including exploring how care experienced children and young people can access arts and culture and how they can be supported to develop careers in the creative industries.

The Institute of Community Research and Development (ICRD) at the University of Wolverhampton are leading research training and support for partners and the Arts Council has commissioned external evaluation of the programme.

The partnerships will present their findings at a national conference at the University of Wolverhampton in June 2025.

It is anticipated that evidence gathered by the Collaborate & Innovate programme will inform future policy and funding approaches at Arts Council England to children and young people in care.

Arts Connect are part of the School of Creative Industries at the University of Wolverhampton.

Arts Connect are delighted to be leading this groundbreaking programme with our partners TMC, as it builds on so much of our previous pioneering work in the region to benefit children in care.

 We have compelling evidence that the way you secure change over the long term is by growing the capacity, skills and connectivity of the key practitioners who actually work in the field. Through Collaborate & Innovate we are building our partners’ confidence and expertise as researchers, who will then become experts on solving the problems they face. This approach is hugely powerful. Deeply working with partners from the Virtual Schools sector on a shared area of concern, swapping realities and bringing different ideas and ways of thinking, develops common strengths and leadership, multiplying the opportunities offered to children and young people in care in the arts and creative sectors.

We are very excited that Arts Connect and TMC have been given this opportunity to potentially shape national policy towards children and young people in care.

Rob Elkington – Director, Arts Connect

At The Mighty Creatives, we’re really excited to be continuing our work with our Virtual School partners and cultural organisations, exploring how we can all best support children and young people with a social worker to engage in creative opportunities. Partnerships provide a vehicle for collaboration and constructive challenge, and we are really excited to see what findings come from the research conducted as a result of these partnerships.

Emily York, Head of Programmes at TMC

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