An interview with Peter Jenkinson OBE (UK)

Keynote speaker Peter Jenkinson OBE will focus on arts partnerships, collaborations and exchanges, by building on his work for over 20 years in the cultural sector. Peter is passionately advocating and acting for deep and lasting change across the cultural and political landscape. In his current role as an independent 'cultural broker' Peter works across a diverse portfolio of disciplines and sectors including broadcasting, public policy, regeneration, museums and galleries, and leadership development. Prior to this he has had a distinguished and award-winning career working across the arts and culture, including his role as founding director of the Creative Partnerships programme and the initiation and delivery of the world-class £21M The New Art Gallery Walsall.

Creative Partnerships is much more than two clichés in one title!

It is the first nationally-coordinated, government-sponsored, long-term creative learning programme in the world linking schools with the best of the creative and cultural sector in order to engender sustainable and positive change for young people, teachers and the broader school community as well as the creative and cultural sector itself.

The program emerged as one of the recommendations of a major report commissioned by New Labour soon after it came to power in 1997. The National Advisory Committee on Creative and Cultural Education (NACCCE) comprised a team of experts chaired by Sir Ken Robinson, then Professor of Education at the University of Warwick. (www.sirkenrobinson.com) Its remit was to consider the question of what an education system fit for twenty-first century needs could and should look like.

After two years of intense enquiry its report All Our Futures made over 50 recommendations for educational transformation. The report suggested that today's education system in England is based on a nineteenth century model designed for an industrialising society where the great majority are taught to be the “workers” and the remaining very small minority are taught to be the “management” and strongly proposed that this is totally inappropriate for contemporary needs and aspirations.

In common with similar enquiries across the world it concluded that creativity must be built into the core of learning including the education system and believed that the arts, cultural and creative sectors, public and private, had a critical (though not exclusive) role in this essential shift in thinking and doing.

As a result Creative Partnerships (www.creative-partnerships.com) was established, with an initial budget of £40 million, in 16 of, to use deficit-language, the most disadvantaged areas of England from Merseyside to the East Coast of Kent, from the Tees Valley to Cornwall. Whilst comprising inner city urban, suburban, rural and coastal areas , what links all of these very different areas is not just poverty in economic terms but also a widespread endemic poverty of aspiration that has crushed the chances of so many young people over generations, resulting in them leaving school classified by others as, and feeling themselves to be, complete failures, a sense of failure that often affects them for the rest of their lives as well as impacting on the lives of others.

In each area up to 25 schools were selected to be part of the Creative Partnerships (CP) programme and a small team of people led by a Creative Director was appointed to each partnership area with their first priority being to work with the schools to identify their priorities and issues – maybe problems of truanting or serious behaviour or in a particular curriculum subject or with progression routes or with communication across the school – and their second priority being, imaginatively and in negotiation with the school, to propose specific and appropriate arts, cultural and creative partners to join the school team.

CP was building on the long and distinguished history of school links with the arts sector in the UK but the added value it was able to bring was to be long-term...an artist might develop a relationship with a school community for a term, or a year or even two rather than the usual day or two...to encourage not just art but creativity across and beyond the curriculum and to establish principles of co-learning where all involved – young person, teacher and creative partner – are open to learning from the experience and amending their practice and at times their values.

CP has significantly expanded across England in the last few years yet almost seven years since it was established it is still difficult to say what exactly CP has achieved but there are definitely many examples, now highlighted by the Government's school inspection agency, that where CP really works it results not only in more engaged students and teachers but also triggers whole school change in ethos, pedagogy and aspiration, demonstrating the true value of partnership working.

What do you think is the key to negotiating successful relationships across different sectors like the arts and education, health, justice, heritage, private enterprise, not for profit organisations and the wider community?

I'm prone to making clichéd comments such as telling people to undertake an act of kindness every day or to “be dangerous”! But one of the statements I most often make is to “make friends with strange people”, as I passionately believe that in doing so, truly new and unexpected value is created. We should all have conversations with people who we initially think have nothing in common or nothing to offer and then witness the surprising and positive results.

The trouble is of course that we are all forced to live in, or even want to live in, ghettoes or bunkers which, whilst offering safety and immediate community, begets a very divided world, at all levels. In this new century I hope we will increasingly see the breaking down of our time-honoured boundaries and develop far greater collaboration across communities and disciplines and globally to tackle serious problems and ambitious projects in genuinely imaginative and interdisciplinary ways...and ways that are sustainable rather than “hit and run.”

But to do so is not going to be easy. It will be a struggle and will take much longer to achieve than working in splendid isolation but then the benefits will be much greater too. The accusation is that such approaches imply the death or downgrading of expertise but this is surely not the case. In all good relationships the partners work to their own strengths whilst hoping to tease the very best out of their partners. Only the very best...excellence...is good enough. This is what I consider the key to successful relationships.

Do you think that partnerships, collaborations and exchanges encourage arts development in the community?

Some have suggested that mass collaboration will become the dominant form of working and of production, including creative production, in this fast-moving century driven not least by the ever greater sophistication, availability and affordability of technology and especially social networking tools. In his latest book We-think. The power of mass collaboration (www.wethinkthebook.net  www.charlesleadbeater.net), Charlie Leadbeater entertainingly and persuasively speculates on the abandonment of top down controls and the flourishing of new forms of exchange, creation and distribution from the bottom up which at its core implies new forms of democracy and power relations. I think this is truly exciting – a Wisdom of Crowds agenda perhaps - but am still struggling to get my head around what the future might look like!

It is complex and confusing but maybe this is no bad thing. What is certain is that we do not as yet understand the true power of harnessing all the assets and resources within communities for positive change, and especially people themselves. We are all capable of doing so much more and hardly any of us ever achieve our full potential as Ken Robinson points out so wittily in his TED speech (www.ted.com - which has had a million+ downloads already!) and JK Rowling so movingly in her Harvard speech last month (www.harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html)

It is another of my oft-used clichés but I believe that purposeful innovation, deep change and lasting regeneration happens in people's hearts and minds. You can throw money at any place and spend it on infrastructure...on roads and buildings and services...but unless people are properly engaged nothing much will shift. We thus arguably need to pay as much attention to the software if you like as to the hardware and fashion new ways in which people of all kinds can be written into the core script to become collective and collaborative agents of change, naïve though this sounds!

This will mean new relationships between so called professionals and so called amateurs to establish partnerships based on mutual trust and respect. I also believe that artists and other creative people have a much greater role to play in innovation and change than they are currently allowed to have by those holding the power. We've got a long way to go!

Finally on a lighter note the phenomenon of flashmobbing has to be one of the best contemporary examples of mass collaboration, if only temporarily, and, if you haven't already seen it, one of the most beautiful I have ever seen is available on You Tube by searching “Frozen Grand Central” - one for that bored moment in your workplace!

Can you tell us what projects you are currently working on and how they are leading the way?

I'm currently working on a broad and diverse range of projects though I'm not sure if they're leading the way! One of the most interesting is acting for the last two years as an Expert Advisor on the post-conflict art programme in the City of Derry in Northern Ireland including a major art commission The Foyle Public Art Commission (www.foylepublicart.com)

Despite all the horrors in and across the divided communities of the city during the dark period of “The Troubles” there is an appetite for change and a willingness for conversations across the divide that I find inspiring and deeply moving. Another intriguing project is Channel 4's audacious Big Art Project (www.channel4.com/bigart) in which I play a role both on screen as a panellist and off screen as a legacy developer and an advocate. The Big Art Project asks the very simple question “What has the public got to do with Public Art?” and results in 6 major commissions by leading artists in communities across the UK with the whole process filmed from start to finish.

This is the most ambitious cultural programme Channel 4 has made and by the time the series screens this November it will have been 4 years in the making – which is almost the equivalent of a century in TV years!

We've also pioneered a moblog where you can upload public art that you love or loathe from your mobile phone or camera to a special website (www.bigartmob.com) Please do join in. I advise the Visual Arts and Galleries Association (VAGA) on policy and strategy including the REALISE your right to art programme (www.vaga.co.uk) and am about to undertake a major study over the next year into young people and literature for The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation working with Arts Council England and championed by the Poet Laureate, with the aim of developing a form of “manifesto” for the future of reading, writing, listening and it is very much inspired by the successful Music Manifesto (www.musicmanifesto.co.uk) which amongst many other things has persuaded the Government to invest over £330 million into music in schools, performing with the written word.

I am involved in many policy forums, debates and conferences, mentor artists and other leaders, write and chat...perhaps too much! I'm very much looking forward to being in Alice Springs and the opportunity to be part of rich and rewarding conversations at art at the heart.