Frances Howard is researching the Arts Award with ‘disengaged ‘ young people. She writes

Pat and I are working to support The Mighty Creatives (TMC), the East Midlands Bridge Organisation, to run Artsmark Support Workshops based around ‘Evidencing the Impact’.

The Artsmark award was re-launched in 2015 and is a mechanism for helping schools to enrich, develop and strengthen their arts and cultural provision. Schools accredited with Artsmark embed the arts in whole school planning and improvement and enable access for their pupils to high quality resources and networks of cultural organisations.

The workshops are designed to help schools explore how they can best capture evidence of impact on children, staff and the wider school. Teachers undertake practical planning exercises which ensure they consider how best to capture the evidence of impact as they go, in order to be able to reflect on the wider impact of their Artsmark journey in the final case study.

The key questions that we have been posing in these workshops are based around the nature of evaluation: What are we hoping to do? What do we expect to see as a result? And what evidence can we gather to see if this has occurred? Key messages we hope to communicate on telling your overall story include thinking small, incorporating a variety of data and thinking about the analysis of data.

Alongside these theoretical considerations and practical exercises, CRACL postgraduate researchers, myself included, have been presenting empirical examples of data gathering and analysis on their research with schools, arts programmes and children and young people.

These workshops are on-going, taking place twice termly, across the East Midlands region.

We are looking forward to continuing this relationship and developing the work further.