Case Studies
The Prince's Foundation for Children & the Arts - Bassett Green Primary School
Children & the Arts’ Start programme partnered with Nuffield Theatre providing funding and support which has allowed them to work with Bassett Green School.
Start’s mission “to provide primary and secondary school students who might never otherwise have the chance, the opportunity to engage with the arts” might have been written for the children at Bassett Green Primary School.
The school is set in the middle of the Flowers Estate in Southampton and the pupils, their families and the school staff deal with all the challenges that arise from severe economic and social deprivation, including a very high rate of unemployment amongst parents and issues arising from drug and alcohol abuse.
A lot of the children at Bassett Green need additional support, be it for social, emotional and behavioural problems or for special needs such as physical disabilities, hearing problems or severe learning difficulties. The school also copes with a significant number of children with English as an additional language and a transient school population with many children starting throughout the school year.
The children at Bassett Green would not go to the theatre without Start, in spite of the fact that the Nuffield is less than half a mile away. So close that on performance days all three hundred pupils, from reception to Year 6, are able to walk up the road together to get there.
The whole school has been involved from the beginning and the long term relationship built through Start means that by the end of the project a large tranche of the children will have been to six different performances at the Nuffield. Teachers talked about the way that their pupils’ confidence and enthusiasm increases with each visit.
The team at Nuffield Theatre design different workshops for the different year groups. Recent collaborations have included the younger children creating collage characters from Alice in Wonderland for a display in the Nuffield’s foyer whilst the older children had a session with the set designer.
Trips to the theatre, or to a gallery or museum do not feature in the home lives of the vast majority of the children at Bassett Green Primary School, engaging with the arts is not a high priority in their community for many valid reasons. Start has given them the opportunity to experience the excitement of the theatre and has introduced them to a venue that is right on their doorstep. For the children at Bassett Green engaging with culture is not an issue of accessibility but of confidence and opportunity, both of which Start has provided for them.