The arts are important for young people because they offer a vehicle for self-expression, exploring ideas and communicating experiences. However, as schools in England face a ‘creativity crisis’, more young people than ever are turning to informal education environments, such as youth centres and youth arts projects, to experience the arts and culture.
Following over a decade of cuts to local authority funding and a 70 per cent decline in youth services in England and Wales, targeted approaches to youth arts provision puts both the arts and youth work on risky terrain. Here are two reasons why:
- Young people are artistic but don’t do ‘arts’
For my research, I spend a lot of time hanging around youth centres and youth groups speaking to young people about what they do in their free time. More often than not, this involves some kind of artistic practice. Perhaps it’s making stuff, or repurposing things. Perhaps it’s digital content creation or simply listening to music. But, if you ask young people if they take part in the arts, they’ll say no.
Young people frequently report that they don’t do arts at school, or that their parents can’t pay for private lessons or clubs. But when young people talk about creativity on their own terms, they confidently define their practice as creative and recognise the artistry in what they do. Away from school, and within youth settings, young people thrive on everyday forms of creativity, DIY arts practices and digital cultures. Quite often these are shunned by or even pitted against the ‘high’ arts, which are seen as an elitist endeavour that is out of reach (and not to the taste) of the majority of young people.
While arts education struggles to keep up with globalised youth culture, the Stormzy vs Mozart debate showed us that despite classed hierarchies, all music has value. Speak to young people at youth clubs, or part of youth arts projects, and they will tell you that they are self-taught, bedroom producers, who are highly invested in their own cultural scenes. Which is why the ‘youth arts’ label misses the mark.
- Why ‘youth arts’ gets funded
The second reason is the assumption that ‘doing art to’ young people can change them for the better. François Matarasso’s seminal text Use or Ornament called the social and economic impacts of the arts into question, yet claims about the power of the arts to ‘transform’ young lives still dominate the funding landscape. Arts funding objectives appear to relate more to changing the young people as individuals, than to supporting those young people to change the world around them. As a result, youth arts become judged in terms of ‘hard’ outcomes, which completely ignore the cultural interests and values of the young people.
Hard results such as access to services, educational and employment outcomes and ‘transferable skills’ are forefronted by funders and determine whether or not programmes get funding. Programmes struggle to achieve or evidence these outcomes and the actual benefits of youth participation in arts programmes are lost. My research has shown that young people attending arts programmes targeting ‘at-risk’ youth, who were assumed to be ‘non-academic’ or having lower-value forms of culture, resulted in artistic outcomes being secondary.
Accompanying this shift in the purpose of youth arts programmes came accountability and new expectations of measurement, which mirrored the landscape of the youth sector. ‘Targeted’ youth work was tasked with generating ‘hard’ outcomes for young people or with solving social problems, such as youth violence, which stemmed from deeply entrenched poverty. These instrumental shifts within England were the result of austerity and arts policy, where decades of underfunding led to decades of over-claiming – a risky strategy for anyone working with young people and the arts, but one that had to be followed, often to keep projects alive and youth centres from closure.
As performativity crept into the domain of the youth centre, youth workers were required to become expert jugglers of the social and economic expectations of youth policy on the one hand, and the artistic, relational and wellbeing experience of young people on the other. But with funders, policy makers, youth workers and young people all setting different expectations for youth arts, where can constructive consensus be found? My book looks at six international youth arts programmes to try to get to the root of the problem.
Global perspectives on youth arts programmes: Common culture, cultural democracy and cultural citizenship
Young people have led the way in raising major global issues such as climate change, Black Lives Matter and forced migration. Youth arts offer a window into and vehicle out of these important conversations. Intersecting with the politics of young people’s everyday lives, a cultural citizenship approach to youth arts is rooted within young people’s worlds and draws on their lived experiences. In recognising that young people have their own ideas, logics and aesthetic values that they bring with them and that they need time and space to grapple with these, young people become artistic producers on their own terms. Where youth arts both engage with professional artists, but also accommodate young people’s interests and artistic practices, the strongest offer is set out.
The arts as an entitlement for all young people afford cultural democracy, which provides a
more positive lens that acknowledges working-class culture. Supporting young people to enter spaces traditionally reserved for the cultural elites, ensuring that diverse perspectives are heard and contributing to a more diverse future landscape for the arts ensures meaningful public engagement. In alternative spaces for youth arts such as youth clubs, community centres or the streets of local communities, a focus on process rather than product represents a meaningful way for young people to experience culture.
In our post-pandemic, or ‘still living with COVID-19’ world, the importance of our time and taking time has been highlighted. Youth arts are a hobby, a form of expression, and for some a personal therapy, without being tethered to external aims. Youth arts are not a vehicle for young people to ‘assimilate’ into ‘normal’ society, and therefore young people’s artistic work needs to be seen outside of the youth club walls, so that youth arts are not pigeonholed.
Frances Howard is Senior Lecturer of Youth Studies in the Department of Social Work, Care and Community at Nottingham Trent University.
Global Perspectives on Youth Arts Programs by Frances Howard is available on the Bristol University Press website. Pre-order here for £80.00.
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