ABSTRACT
This chapter focuses on schools as places as buildings, hubs and meeting points for a variety of activities, events and relationships—and on the ways in which schools can use the creative arts to help students change their understandings of place and their relationship to the local. It provides an analysis of the portrait of Oak Tree Primary. The priority for Oak Tree, after its unfavourable inspection, was to improve learning by engaging and motivating students more successfully. The portrait offers a worked example of the development of the partnership between a school and a creative institution. The pervasive influence of the performativity agenda, with its narrow focus on pupil outcomes, could be seen in the persistent attempts by a proportion of the staff to channel the artists into the role of providing extra lessons and services to the children. The children knew from the outset that the third session was to be the highlight of the project.
