About the film

This arts education documentary film follows the Maltings North Northumberland Schools Engagement Programme, a year-long project bringing artists and teachers together in schools and gallery spaces across the rural north of the county. The programme ran from 2021 to 2022 and involved workshops in dance, beatboxing, drama and quilt-making, alongside artist CPD sessions and visits to the Granary Gallery in Berwick-upon-Tweed.

The film moves between classrooms, galleries and studio spaces, spending time with teachers, artists and children from Early Years through to Key Stage 3. What the programme was trying to do was not straightforward to describe in a sentence: it was about expanding what a lesson could feel like, and giving both teachers and pupils permission to not know where something was going. The film tries to stay close to that quality.

One strand that runs clearly through the footage is quilt-making, developed in response to the Quilt Resurgence exhibition at the Granary Gallery. Older pupils worked with a professional quilt maker, handling needle and thread and making small textile pieces. Another strand came through movement and sound, with younger children exploring dance and beatboxing in ways that were genuinely open-ended. These sessions were not about producing a finished thing. They were about finding out what happened when children were given room to experiment.

Making this arts education documentary film meant spending time in a range of schools spread across a large rural area. Access to professional artists and cultural organisations is not straightforward for many communities in north Northumberland, and the programme was designed specifically with that in mind. The Maltings has a long relationship with schools across the region, and that trust made the filming feel grounded from the start.

Approach

Rather than trying to cover everything the programme involved, I focused on spending time in particular sessions and letting the rhythm of each one come through. Artist CPD sessions were filmed alongside classroom work, which gave the film a useful counterpoint: practitioners reflecting on their own practice and what it means to work with very young children, including babies and nursery-aged children whose engagement with creative activity looks quite different from older pupils.

There is a moment in the film where a teacher talks about learning to start something without knowing where it is going. That kind of honesty from participants was what made the filming straightforward in the best sense. People were genuinely engaged with what the programme was asking of them, and that showed. An arts education documentary film of this kind works best when the people being filmed have already forgotten about the camera, and by the time we were in the later sessions, that was mostly the case.

The two stills below give a sense of the range of settings: an artist working directly with children, and a pupil in the Granary Gallery during one of the programme’s gallery visits. Both were important parts of what the programme was trying to do, and both appear in the film.