Local Cultural Education Partnerships (LCEPs) are an England-wide network of change partnerships. In the North East, Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums drives the LCEP network in its remit as an Arts Council England Bridge organisation.
Introduction
LCEPs are cross-sector strategic partnerships, creating long-term change in working practices in order to make a real impact on the lives of children and young people. They start with the needs of young people and take a place-based approach to address barriers to the arts, exploring how cultural experiences can equip children with the skills needed to succeed at school and in later life.
The challenge
The North East is made up of 12 local authorities – and all 12 are in the top 20 local authorities across England where child poverty rates have increased the most. The most recent figures indicate that 40 per cent of children in our region are living in poverty. The Department for Education annual census figures released in June 2022 show that almost one in three pupils in the North East are now receiving free school meals (compared with 1 in 4.4 nationally). All of our local authorities, except Newcastle and Gateshead, have been identified as Levelling Up for Culture places. In short: here we have a huge number of young people, living in poverty, and facing multiple barriers to accessing the arts and culture.
Tyne & Wear Archives & Museums (TWAM) manages the Culture Bridge North East (CBNE) programme on behalf of Arts Council England, as part of the national Bridge network. CBNE exists to support the cultural and education sectors to build more effective partnerships, in order to work towards our ambition that every child and young person in the North East benefits from access to a rich cultural childhood. As a result of the challenges faced by our region, all of our work through the Bridge programme is about social mobility; we are working to break down socio-economic barriers to engagement and utilise culture to improve life chances.
The solution
LCEPs are a key focus of the England-wide Bridge network. In the North East, CBNE has established an LCEP in every area, giving full regional coverage of eight LCEPs in total; wherever a young person lives in the region, there is an LCEP working on their behalf. We have galvanised LCEPs to respond to the child poverty statistics, and create a network of change right across the region; LCEPs are a brilliant mechanism for democratising access to culture. We believe that using culture to address social inequality, provide opportunities for language development, build confidence and sense of self, and help young people to find the possibilities in their world, all contribute towards better educational attainment and life chances.
LCEPs start with the needs of young people in their area – how can arts and culture help to address the specific issues being faced by children and young people, in this place, at this time? How can we overcome barriers to accessing cultural opportunity, and where does the work need to be targeted to reach those young people who are most in need? Activity is focused on schools in disadvantaged areas, in rural areas, or with high numbers of SEND pupils, and explores utilising culture to develop skills that will equip young people with the tools needed to succeed at school.
LCEPs are cross-sector partnerships, with partners from the cultural and education sectors, and additional sectors represented according to local need, including youth, public health, housing, further and higher education, and early years provision. All of our LCEPs include local authority representation – this may be from arts development, cultural engagement, education and skills, or public health. Partners work together to address local need, developing new ways of working, better communication between sectors, and collective power in seeking funding.
The impact
A lot of the magic of LCEPs comes simply from regularly putting people in a room together – LCEPs are delivering coordinated work, but there’s also all the incidental conversations, the widening of networks, and the LCEP partners who start working more closely together in their wider roles. Education sector representatives share their current priorities and concerns, enabling others to shape their ways of working in response, ensuring consistent relevance and reflection, and supporting improving outcomes in schools.
Activity that is driven and delivered by the LCEPs is able to be targeted in order to most effectively address the key issues in that area. For example, the Newcastle LCEP was founded by headteachers from each school trust across the city, and is driven by the priorities they identified from their work. Their #InspiredBy programme brings schools and cultural organisations together to work on innovative models of bespoke partnership, driven by pupils’ needs. Newcastle City Council part-funded a coordinator role to lead this work. In No Voice Too Small, one of 6 projects taking place across the city with 17 different schools, Gosforth Schools Trust identified 136 pupils with low emotional resilience and confidence, from across all five of their first schools. They worked with Unfolding Theatre to focus on developing public speaking skills using drama techniques, creating short films written and narrated by the pupils. Targeted work for pupils who needed it most enabled maximum impact on confidence:
When the video got recorded I was really shy but they [artist facilitators] were all really happy and didn’t do a face at me so I carried on and I luckily did it! My words weren’t too long and I made up some bits of it myself and me and the No Voice Too Small people thought it was great!”
– pupil
How is the new approach being sustained?
Our LCEPs are now all delivering work, and getting stronger and more established – but this has been a long time in the making. It’s taken seven years from initial conversations to get here, and we are continually mindful that Bridge funding ends in March 2023. We are working closely with all our LCEPs to support them to ensure sustainability and independence from Bridge support by this point.
Focusing on building a strong internal infrastructure is where we can make the biggest difference to sustainability of LCEPs at this time. We have invested in tailored specialist support for each LCEP to enable them to revise strategic plans, devise communications strategies, build brands and integrate the voice of local young people into decision making processes. We bring our LCEPs together as a network to encourage peer support and learning, and hope that this network will continue over years to come.
Ongoing sustainable funding streams are also key to long-term LCEP success. In many cases, LCEPs have helped local authority funding go further. Our Partnership Investment fund is available for LCEPs to create long-term strategic-level change in their area, and must be match funded with money from outside the cultural sector. In many of our LCEP areas, local authorities have contributed or directed external funding to create this match.
What happens next for LCEPs? We believe they are the right mechanism, certainly for our region, for breaking down barriers and ensuring that culture belongs to all children and young people – but where will strategic-level regional and national support come from once the Bridge network ends? As TWAM, we want to continue to provide support if possible – but what could the role of local government be more broadly across England to ensure that all the work of the last seven years is not lost?
Lessons learned
The journey of LCEPs has been a steep learning curve – nothing new was ever created by keeping doing things in the same old ways! Our top three lessons have been:
Just get something happening – it’s hard to imagine what a new large-scale partnership might look like until it’s doing something. People need something to coalesce around – and there is only so much theoretical talk that will keep partners engaged. Using LCEPs as a test bed for new ideas has given focus to partnerships, and shown what could be possible. You don’t have to wait to get exactly the right people around the table; the right people are those who are in the room, and others will come on board as evidence of impact begins to appear and benefits are clearer.
Goodwill alone is not enough – we are lucky to have so many committed people in the North East who have voluntarily given energy to establishing their LCEPs, but resourcing is really important, both to move the work forwards, and to demonstrate that the effort people are putting in is valued and respected. Our LCEPs really began to fly once they were able to fund coordinator roles; someone who had dedicated time to focus on the bigger picture and to keep the details moving made all the difference.
The whole is greater than the sum of its parts – bringing multiple sectors together in partnership means increased expertise, more capacity, better communication, increased understanding, and more creative spark. It takes a while for everyone to learn each other’s language and to develop a common understanding, but once that groundwork is done, things can really take off. This applies to LCEPs working together too; some of our most interesting outcomes have come from two or more LCEPs working jointly on shared ambitions.
Contact
Mel Burgess, CBNE Programme Manager, email: [email protected]