No more blundering around

Stan’s Cafe is essentially a theatre company. We devise our own shows and try to make them extraordinary. Alongside, we have always worked with young people, right from the start in 1991 (when we were young people). Initially, we blundered around providing drama workshops and making shows with kids big and small. Then we got our hands on some video kit and blundered around making videos with kids mostly small. The big breakthrough for us came in 2002 with Creative Partnerships (CP), which aimed to pair artists with schools in order to encourage teaching for creativity. In the CP world, flexible thinking, creative problem-solving and a genuine joy in collaboration were key assets. They were also our stock in trade and suddenly we were doing a lot of work in schools.

By the time the plug was pulled on CP we had spent a decade honing our skills in schools and building an impressive portfolio of projects ranging across, between and beyond artforms. To do no more schools work was unconscionable, a waste of talent, skills, experience, investment and potential. This argument was made to Arts Council England (ACE) who added a sum to our funding agreement hypothecated to deliver exemplary education work. With this new arrangement we were keen to explore how far we could get if, rather than working with a school for a single project, we could work with them through a year on multiple projects. We felt that through building trust and shared experiences over an extended period we could start to make truly extraordinary things happen.

So, in a delicious turning of tables, we audition schools to work with us

So, in a delicious turning of tables, we audition schools to work with us. The winners were Billesley Primary School in the south of Birmingham, a school just emerging from special measures with a fighting spirit, a visionary headteacher and spare rooms for us to make a mess in. During our first year together, our ACE funding supplemented the school’s money to make a variety of projects possible. We built a magnificent marble run with the whole school. We rewrote Treasure Island as a photo story with Year 2. We invented a board testing knowledge of the Tudors with Year 4. Year 5 videoed their trips into space and Year 6 built an art installation. And we also helped make the school sports day more like the Olympic Games.

Originally we had intended in our second year to work with a secondary school, but we felt we had only just started with Billesley. By now our collaboration had made enough impact to be paid for at full cost and so we could undertake a similar programme of creative work without dipping into our hypothecated ACE money. This sum could not be used to pay for something more artistically challenging.

Reflecting on our education practice we started to feel like frauds. We always introduced ourselves to schools as a theatre company and yet we never made any theatre in schools. The time had come to right this wrong. Any fool can start a war was an hour-long show for a cast of 60, telling the story of the Cuban missile crisis. The story was detailed, complicated, dramatic and performed by 10 and 11 year olds. We treated it with all the seriousness of our ‘professional’ shows. We performed it three times at mac birmingham, where the rest of the school saw it alongside a regular Stan’s Cafe audience. We were proud of the show, but much more proud of the cast who had made amazing progress. It was a triumphant end to our second year of collaboration.

Just as we were entering that second year with Billesley, we received a call from the Deputy Head of Washwood Heath Academy, a large secondary school in the east of Birmingham. He remembered work we had done at his previous school with CP and asked if we would consider an extended collaboration working with teachers to help inject more creativity into lessons and improve the school’s cultural offer.

The success of this second relationship and an approach from Victoria Academies Trust has encouraged us to formalise our relationships and develop a partner school network in which schools guarantee to spend a certain sum on our services each year for a minimum of two years. The partner schools have an opportunity to share good practice and the guaranteed income they deliver us has allowed us to develop our medium-term planning, recruit a creative learning manager and have the capacity to deliver bespoke projects these schools cherish.

For our plan to be complete, we need a fourth partner school and here the academy system helps. Washwood Heath has taken on its neighbour Saltley School where we have been asked to go and work with its maths department. Meanwhile, Victoria Academies Trust has asked us to work in a new school, Rowley Park Primary in Stafford. Here we started with a staff training adventure on their second day and now have a Grand Carnival planned for later in October. Umbrellas at the ready? With carnivals now part of a new revenue stream, we are prepared for a rainy day or two.

James Yarker is Artistic Director of Stan’s Cafe.
www.stanscafe.co.uk