INTRODUCTION

Q. What is the connection between Birmingham Symphony Hall and the Cizez exhibition of children’s art in Vienna in 1932?

A. The old Howard Street Primary School in Birmingham. Well, it is a long and apparently tall story, but it is a good one because it really is true. It was in Vienna that visiting HMI John Blackie saw children’s art so breathtaking that he came back determined to encourage primary schools not to focus exclusively on the three Rs, but to use children’s naive natural talent in art to foster their self-esteem and powers of selfexpression, to give them the thrill of confidence which comes from harnessing natural artistic ability. He encouraged Peter Stone, then head of Steward Street School, to develop the arts when Alec Clegg was a wartime administrator in Margaret Street. Clegg poached Stone when he went to the West Riding and so influenced and publicised the development of all forms of the arts in primary schools. You can see the never-ending thread of artistic excellence in Birmingham primary schools today. There is an amazing teacher at one North Birmingham junior school who has written and produced original works for her school involving casts of hundreds, and a teacher in another school who annually reworks Shakespeare with children’s help to produce vivid original works of art. They are but two of dozens who are strong on drama. Indeed, it was a teacher in Hall Green Junior School who last year revived with such great success the drama festival in which primary schools delighted each other with their performances. And what is one to make of the youngsters with severe disabilities at Wilson Stuart School who created sound and movement that transformed themselves, and transformed a recent evening at the Albert Hall into a spectacle of breathtaking beauty and celebration? On the same evening there was the chance to bathe in the efforts of some outstanding musicians, all of whom have benefited from our peripatetic music service, which has thrived after delegation and has enormous potential-yet it has scarcely begun to ensure that children from different cultural backgrounds are given every chance to discover their musical talents. I have vivid memories of a kaleidoscope of learning in the arts. I will shake the kaleidoscope three times. The first memory is of a class of

8-year-olds whose imagination was harnessed by a talented teacher, first to create their own play and then to perform it before an amazed audience of parents and colleagues. The play was the work of the children, although you could see the hand of the teacher. Like all good teachers of the arts, however, she had ensured that the influence was sensitively judged and that it in no way detracted from the raw emotion and stark message of the play, which was about the environment and how the children had carried out on their own accord an audit of how ‘future friendly’ their school really was. The second shake of the kaleidoscope is far away from Birmingham and long ago. It was in Didcot in the mid-1980s. I was following a child-pupil pursuits we used to call themto see how teenagers really felt. This particular teenager was turned off, bored, on the verge of disruption all day and, as I discovered as I got to know him, on the same knife edge in other parts of his life. That is, until suddenly his posture changed, his eyes lit up and we entered ‘a cave of feelings’—his words not mine-which was the school’s drama studio. It was not so much the studio as the teacher who inspired him. The boy was

suddenly, quite simply, a different person, capable of movement and expression, of teamwork and of creativity that would have astounded all the other teachers he encountered that day and, I expect, his family. In other pupil pursuits similar transforming effects could be seen in the art room. There, through a variety of media, young people who were otherwise switched off found a key to their own self-belief and their particular identity of hope and talent. My third and final shake of the kaleidoscope is a more recent one, in the Shakespeare Room of the Central Library where Benjamin Zephaniah was reading poetry to a group of young poets from Ladywood School. Like so many enthusiasts for the arts, especially after the long debate about the first and second National Curriculum, I am glad there is still the courage to back judgement about the importance of the arts as a key to learning for so many young people. That is why we feature the arts within the Primary Guarantee. That is why the city of Birmingham is pleased to co-operate with the West Midlands Arts Council to provide opportunities for joint ventures, especially for artists in residence. That is why the city wants to find ways of supporting initiatives such as theatre-in-education groups, especially, of course, those associated with equal opportunities such as Voice-Box, Language Alive and Big Brum. Some schools use their budget balances really creatively, to transform the learning environment through the arts with bought-in work-shops for three, four or five days, to highlight dance, music, drama, storytelling or artistic creation

through various media. The outcome is usually the discovery of young talent which otherwise might be denied us all. Sir Hugh Casson spoke recently of the young autistic genius, Stephen Wiltshire, whose architectural drawings have created almost a new art form. Casson’s words were chosen so well as a compliment to the young genius’s artistic talent: ‘Every now and then’ he wrote, ‘a rocket of young talent appears and explodes and continues to shower us with its sparks. Stephen Wiltshire is one of those rockets.’ Whether in the Ladywood Poetry Festival, in the Broadway Arts Festival with its impressive emphasis on South Asian art or in the many other events happening in our schools, there is no better city or more energetic set of teachers to discover that talent.