Creative Review - Health & Wellbeing in the Education System
With increasing concern around the mental health of children and young people, and the lasting impacts on health and wellbeing into adulthood, this Creative Health Review theme looks at creative and cultural programmes within schools, and how to ensure that such activities are available to all, and how the health and wellbeing benefits can be maximised through embedding creative health into the education system.
The National Centre for Creative Health (NCCH) and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing (APPG AHW) Creative Health Review Report notes:
As well as producing the creatives of the future, creativity as part of school life provides children with a broad range of transferrable life skills and improves their future outcomes. Creativity supports children’s health and wellbeing - particularly relevant as we face a mental health crisis in young people. Schools can offer universal access to creative activity, reducing inequalities in both access to arts and culture and in health outcomes. Given the importance of early intervention in supporting mental health and reducing inequalities, schools are a vital component of the creative health ecosystem.
However, opportunities to engage in creative activities at school are increasingly limited, as arts-related subjects are de-prioritised and cuts to creative subjects in higher education further disincentives uptake of the arts in schools. Creativity should be a key pillar of the education system, accessible to all and prioritised within the curriculum. This will have significant long term benefits for individuals. It will also lead to reduced pressures on the healthcare system, contribute to the levelling up agenda and feed the creative industries workforce. A coherent approach across all sectors will ensure the development of a creative health ecosystem which is self-sustaining in the long term. The Department for Education (DfE) therefore has an important role to play in the development of a cross-departmental strategy on creative health.
Download the full Health and Wellbeing in the Education System chapter here >>
Read the full Creative Health Review Report here >>
Explore our Health and Wellbeing in the Education System case studies:
Further information about the Creative Health Review
The Creative Health Review highlights the potential for creative health to help tackle pressing issues in health and social care and more widely, including health inequalities The Review has gathered evidence that shows the benefits of creative health in relation to major current challenges, and examples of where this is already working in practice.
Find out more about the Creative Health Review >>
Lived experience engagement
Alongside a panel of esteemed Commissioners, a Lived Experience Advisory Panel has helped to translate the evidence from the Review into recommendations for policymakers, this included Gemma O'Brien, an artist, researcher, and change maker with lived experience.
Listen to the speech extract by Gemma O’Brien at the Creative Health Review Report Launch >>
Gemma O’Brien is an artist, researcher, and change maker currently working at The Wellcome Trust on a Graduate Programme. She is passionate about the meaningful incorporation of lived experience into research, service design, and national policy and has previously co-produced lived experience guidance, art exhibitions, and mental health training. She is also currently a lived experience advisor on the AHRC Research Programme, Mobilising Community Assets to Tackle Health Inequalities. Before working at Wellcome she worked at 42nd Street, a Young Person’s Mental Health charity in Manchester, where she was Associate Director of a campaign, festival, and symposium advocating for young people’s Rights to a Creative Life. At 42nd Street she conducted research that sought to understand the effective components of creative spaces in improving young people’s mental health. The outputs of this have created a toolkit that can be replicated and applied in alternative spaces, including hospitals, schools, and shopping centres.
Creativity for Health & Wellbeing in the Education System Roundtable
Central to the Review were a series of themed roundtables that were held between Autumn 2022 and Summer 2023. The Review has translated the findings from these Roundtable themes together with contributions into recommendations for policymakers to encourage and inform the development of a cross-governmental creative health strategy, which will support creative health to flourish and maximise its potential across key policy areas.
Watch the recording of Health & Wellbeing in the Education System roundtable here >>
Roundtable summary and overview >>
Listen to the lived-experience speech extracts from this roundtable:
Sarah Williams, Head Teacher, Faith Primary Academy, talks about the impact of working with the Royal Liverpool Philharmonic >>
Health & Wellbeing in the Education System - Creative Response
The Review commissioned a range of artists with their own lived experience to respond creatively to each of the Review's roundtable themes. Vikki Parker responded to creativity for health and wellbeing in the education system.
"Education is fundamentally an intimate, individual experience that writes a legacy on the heart, mind, and body, and influences the rest of a person’s life. The system delivers to a collective, often forgetting the whole person, despite attempts to show otherwise. Without the arts we are breeding robots for systems. In my painting I ask the question - if this glorious expansion is not happening within a child at school, then what are doing?"
Explore Vikki’s Creative Response >>
