Creative democracy, and what it might mean for schools (and trusts)

I’ve just read Future Arts Centres and Goldsmiths’ new paper on Creative Democracy, summarising a roundtable held at Goldsmiths in April this year. I think it says something important that goes well beyond arts centres; something that lands, quite directly, on schools too.

Dewey’s street corner, reimagined

The paper takes John Dewey’s 1939 essay Creative Democracy: The Task Before Us as its starting point. Dewey wasn’t talking about the arts at all; he used creativity to mean the generative, everyday work of democracy itself; the conversations that happen on street corners, the habits of cooperation and faith in other people that make democracy something continually remade, rather than a box ticked once every few years. Future Arts Centres have borrowed his title and turned it into something more literal: the idea that cultural organisations can act as bridges between communities and the institutions that govern them, using creative methods to open up conversations that formal consultation processes routinely fail to have.

The two case studies in the paper make this concrete. Old Diorama Arts Centre ran fourteen workshops with 150 residents around Euston’s redevelopment, asking deceptively simple questions like “what makes a good home?”; it led to an actual Housing Pact with Camden Council. Barnsley Civic did something similar for the council’s Pride in Place programme, reaching LGBTQ+ residents, SEND adults, and other groups that conventional consultation had never touched, and ended up with a seat on the board overseeing £20 million of regeneration funding. In both cases, the mechanism was the same: trust built over years, a physical presence in the community, and creative methods that let people answer open questions in their own terms rather than filling in a form designed by someone else.

Why this isn’t just an arts-sector story

Reading it, I kept translating arts centre into school in my head, and the translation held up better than I expected.

Schools (and trusts) are anchor institutions too; often more permanent, more trusted, and more physically embedded in a community than almost anything else nearby. They already do a version of what Old Diorama and Barnsley Civic are being praised for: convening people, holding space for difficult conversations, running events that pull in people who’d never attend a council meeting. What they don’t always do is treat that civic role as deliberate practice, with its own methodology, rather than as a side-effect of just being a school.

The paper’s closing themes (trust, pacts, bridges, space, scaffolding) are ones I’d apply just as readily to how a school works with its own community as to how an arts centre works with a local authority. Pupil voice structures are, at their best, a school’s own small-scale creative democracy: not a survey, not a suggestion box, but a genuine attempt to ask open questions and let pupils direct where the conversation goes, the way Old Diorama’s residents were asked “what makes a good neighbourhood?” rather than “which of these three options do you prefer?” Barnsley Civic’s Creative Consultation Playbook – collaborate and co-design, use creative and qualitative outputs, work with people who are trusted, tell people why you’re asking, close the loop – reads like a better version of school improvement consultation than most schools actually run. But families are also part of the consultation, a web of stakeholders that extends beyond pupils and staff, and weaves in those people who may not be current families and pupils and those the school works with.

Making connections

This sits close to two things I’ve been circling for a while. In The Future of Teaching, I argued that exposure to culture and creativity isn’t peripheral to education but fundamental to formation; to how young people make sense of the world and their place in it. Creative Democracy gives that argument a sharper, more civic edge: culture isn’t just formation for the individual, it’s infrastructure for the collective, a way communities and institutions learn to trust and hear each other. And in my recent update on cultural education policy, I noted that arts education keeps getting treated as a schools-only, curriculum-only question, disconnected from the wider civic and economic case for it. This paper is a useful corrective: it’s a reminder that cultural practice’s value isn’t confined to the arts subjects on a timetable, or even to childhood; it’s a set of transferable methods for how institutions and communities can actually talk to each other, and schools, as much as arts centres, are sitting on an underused version of that capacity.

The RSA’s own Learning About Culture project – where I spent time as one of the Cultural Learning Evidence Champions in the network the RSA built alongside it – reached a similar conclusion from the opposite direction. Between 2017 and 2021, the RSA and the Education Endowment Foundation ran five large-scale randomised control trials of arts-based learning activities in over 400 primary schools, specifically to test whether they improved attainment in reading and writing. The headline finding was blunt: none of the five showed a statistically significant impact on attainment. But the secondary outcomes told a more interesting story. Pooled across the Key Stage 2 trials, there was a statistically significant positive effect on writing self-efficacy, and teachers reported far higher perceived impact than the tests picked up; on confidence, engagement, self-regulation, and pupils’ sense of themselves as authors and creators. The RSA’s own recommendation, drawn from that mismatch, was that the sector should stop trying to justify the arts through attainment claims the evidence can’t reliably support, and build advocacy instead on the three purposes it set out in its Fair Education programme: capability, agency, and community. An arts-rich education as something that builds the wherewithal to participate in shaping one’s own life and community, not just a route to better test scores.

That third purpose, community, is close to the ground the Creative Democracy paper is standing on. Being an Evidence Champion taught me how hard-won that finding was; how much resistance there still is, inside the sector itself, to putting down the attainment argument even when the sector’s own trials say it isn’t holding up. But it also showed me why the RSA felt able to make that recommendation with confidence: because it had three years of properly randomised evidence behind it, not just conviction. If schools want to make the civic case Creative Democracy is making for arts centres (that they build trust, agency, and community capacity) they’ll need the same discipline the RSA applied to attainment: rigorous evidence for the claims that actually matter, rather than borrowed claims that happen to be easier to measure.

The evidence gap

There’s a companion problem worth naming, and the RSC’s Jacqui O’Hanlon set it out clearly in a research blog on evidence-informed decision-making for arts-rich schools. Her starting point is blunt: there’s no national data set on what arts provision actually exists in schools, and no agreed benchmark for what “good” looks like. The RSC’s own Time to Listen research found something that sits neatly alongside the Creative Democracy paper’s themes of trust and agency: young people said creative subjects were often the only school spaces where they felt genuine agency, where mistakes and new ideas were allowed; and that when they sensed society didn’t value those subjects, the subjects stopped feeling valuable to them too. That’s a trust relationship collapsing in exactly the way Barnsley Civic and Old Diorama were trying to rebuild, just happening inside a classroom instead of a town hall.

The RSC’s response – becoming the first performing arts organisation with Independent Research Organisation status, and running the Time to Act programme with the Paul Hamlyn Foundation to build proper measurement tools, co-designed with teachers and pupils – is the sector doing for itself what the Creative Democracy paper argues arts centres could do for local government: building the evidence and the methodology needed to be taken seriously by institutions that default to what’s easily quantified. O’Hanlon’s line that we need to measure what we value, not value what we measure, could sit as an epigraph for both pieces of work. If schools want to make the civic case for themselves that this paper makes for arts centres, they’ll need the same thing the RSC is building: not just conviction, but evidence that survives contact with a sceptical funder or a risk-averse local authority.

The paper is honest about the risks: funding structures that reward scale over depth, the danger of “Creative Democracy” curdling into sector jargon, and the real question of who still gets excluded even from well-designed creative consultation. Those cautions apply just as much inside a school gate as outside one. But the underlying claim – that trusted, creative, community-rooted institutions can do a kind of democratic work that formal consultation structurally can’t – feels like exactly the argument schools/trusts could be making about themselves.