We have two key research priorities:

• there is a widely recognised international gap in knowledge about long term effects of the immersion teachers and student in arts activities. We aim for a set of longitudinal research in this area.
• support for local/regional cultural learning programmes that make a difference to the life chances of young people

We also have an interest in methodological questions about the analysis of messy data, expanding the range of text genres and data representations.

We have partnership research working with the Nottingham Migrant Resource Centre,  Nottingham Contemporary,  and Tate ( London). We support professional development in evaluation for Arts Mark schools, with The Mighty Creatives. We are heavily involved in the Midlands Higher Education Cultural Education Forum.

Current research

TALE: Investigating the arts learning of 60 teachers and their students. The teachers and their schools have been deeply engaged with the professional development programmes offered by Royal Shakespeare Company and Tate Learning. (2015-2018)  Arts Council Heritage Lottery funded, Christine Hall, Pat Thomson, Anton Franks, Lexi Earl and Becky Parry. Website and blog

Circuit Longitudinal Study: Life stories of young people engaged in the Circuit regional galleries programme. (2015- 2017) Funded by Tate and Paul Hamlyn, Pat Thomson and Becky Coles.

POPUP: an evaluation of a teacher development programme: An interview, case study and observation based study.  Funded by PopUp Paul Hamlyn grant.  Jenny Elliot, Christine Hall and Pat Thomson

Recently completed research

Story Smash: An Arts council funded project with Nottingham’s City Libraries, the Video Game Foundation. City of Literature and the University of Nottingham. it examines the ways in which creative writing and game development can improve literacies. Becky Parry is doing the evaluation of the literacies component.

World  without Walls evaluation, Serpentine Gallery. Case study, survey and interview based research looking at Changing Play, Youth Forum and Moving Up programmes, Funded by Serpentine. Pat Thomson and Anton Franks with Nicky Sim and Louisa Penfold.

Interim report: worldwithoutwalls_interimresearchreport_final-copy