Edinburgh schoolchildren are embracing a wealth of opportunities to engage with arts and culture, with new research from Culture Republic showing that every City of Edinburgh Council-funded primary and secondary school took part in some form of arts engagement activity in the academic year 2013-14. The research, undertaken through the Creative Lives project, identified more than 5,500 learning and participation opportunities and nearly 11,000 individual sessions* at local arts venues and in schools, reaching a total of 28,000 pupils** at City of Edinburgh Council funded schools and benefiting nearly a quarter of a million individuals across the city as a whole.

Funded by the City of Edinburgh Council, The Creative Lives project is a partnership between Culture Republic, the City of Edinburgh Council’s Culture and Sport Department and City of Edinburgh Council Children and Families Department. Following a successful two-term pilot in 2012, the project has been running for two years “to create an overview for the city in order to understand the nature, provision and impacts of learning and participation activity”.

As Creative Lives project managers, the research team at Culture Republic collected information from over 30 arts organisations and a vast network of freelance arts coordinators to compile a citywide database of the learning and participation events available to Edinburgh’s schools, community groups and the general public during the school year 2013-14.

When data collection closed at the end of the 2014 school year, Culture Republic analysts teased out a comprehensive picture of learning and participation activities on offer across the city, and as well as looking at opportunities available specifically for the city’s schools which made up over 60% of the learning events and participants included in the study.

The project focused on the number of schools providing cultural experiences to their students; the effectiveness of these interventions; the schools’ motivations for participation and how the activities they undertook were linked to the Curriculum for Excellence. It wanted to:

• Understand the scale of the city’s current learning and outreach activity;
• Share and develop good practice amongst practitioners;
• Identify areas of under-provision;
• Make recommendations for strategic intervention to extend the reach and impact of learning and participation activities;
• Develop opportunities for partnerships and joint working across the city;
• Make the most of the Council’s ongoing strategic investment.

By drawing together a comprehensive database of examples of activities on offer in a single geographic area, the Creative Lives project paints a clear picture of the tremendous social impact that the arts and culture can have in our communities through learning and participation work. It highlights innovative and effective strategies for audience engagement with key groups such as young people, people living in communities that rank highly on the Scottish Index of Multiple Deprivation, or people with specific physical or mental health conditions. Through Creative Lives, arts organisations have been able to learn from one another, sharing examples of new and improved practice for learning and participation, and the benefits of local government funding can be maximised.

The project provides an effective model of practice for collaborative working, facilitating shared learning across different areas of local government as well as with arts and cultural practitioners. Individual arts organisations were responsible for in-house data gathering, sharing findings with Culture Republic to build up the citywide picture. These organisations were represented in the project’s strategic leadership, with places on the Creative Lives steering group alongside City Council staff members. In-person sharing events throughout the project allowed a range of practitioners to make connections across the city and across areas of practice. Although the people involved in the project all entered it with different objectives, the partnerships built in the course of Creative Lives have succeeded on account of the clearly defined shared goals on which the project was built.

Creative Lives shows that there is a huge amount of terrific learning and participation work taking place across Edinburgh – both in schools and in the community. We now have the data that prove what some might have guessed by intuition. Edinburgh’s schools have excellent levels of participation in the arts and culture. But this is no time for complacency: we can see that this activity is not evenly distributed across the city. Some schools had much higher levels of engagement than others, and another important result of the Creative Lives research has been to highlight gaps in provision and areas for development, as well as providing arts organisations with a much closer understanding of the needs of the schools, community groups and underserved communities with which they work.

* Some of the opportunities were one-off events and some were projects with multiple meetings.

** Across primary and secondary schools. This number includes potential duplication (a child who participated in more than one activity).