Ideas for visual arts in early years - the CreatAbility Project in West Sussex

For more information contact Teresa Grimaldi here

Project Summary

Creative practice in early years has been developed in West Sussex since 2004 through a series of projects and professional development opportunities including the CreatAbility Pilot project, CreatAbility main project, Open Sesame Project, and through becoming a pathfinder partner for Earlyarts. 

Creativity is an essential element of early childhood education, and the Early Years Foundation Stage recommends a process-led approach to creative learning. However, many early years settings lack the skills and confidence to approach creativity in this way. Working with artists is an effective way to improve confidence and develop skills, however there are significant barriers to sustained partnerships with artists – including cost and the lack of artists with early years experience. 

These projects have systematically tested and explored a number of approaches and an understanding of how artists and early years settings can work effectively together has evolved, with the most recent project, Open Sesame bringing artists and early years practitioners together to share skills and learn together in a collaborative model.  

The projects have all been developed in partnership with the Early Childhood Service at West Sussex County Council.

Aims and objectives 

• To increase the local pool of artists with experience of working in early years
• To facilitate and develop partnerships between the early years sector and the arts and cultural sector
• To engage with families and give them opportunities to experience the impact that creative practice has on their children’s learning
• To support children’s creative development
• To support professional development of artists and early years practitioners
• To be a regional lead for early years creative practice

CreatAbility Pilot Project - 2004 to 2005

This project employed two lead artists – Claire Simpson and Teresa Grimaldi - and two trainee artists who developed their approach through a period of research and development and then worked with five nurseries over a four week period. In the final week, each nursery also held a sharing session for parents. Each participating nursery then led a dissemination session for other settings where they demonstrated the skills that they had learned and talked about the impact this had had on their practice. These sessions were also supported by a film that had been made about the project which can be accessed here: http://vimeo.com/22708795

Over 100 copies of the film were distributed within West Sussex and sold to early years services in other parts of the country.

CreatAbility Main Project – 2005 to 2007

Building on the pilot project, this was a multi-artform project employing four lead artists in visual arts (Claire Simpson and Teresa Grimaldi), music (Sharon Quinn) and dance (Amanda Drago) plus three trainee artists (Jane Gordon, Louise Bradbury and Natasha Mackenzie). This team worked with ten settings over eight weeks and the artists developed their creative practice by sharing practice and combining artforms together.

The project was recorded by a writer and photographer (Stella Skinner and Matthew Andrews) who were commissioned by the project to produce a book that was published by Sage Publications in 2007 and has since sold hundreds of copies.

(see http://www.uk.sagepub.com/books/Book230673)

The CreatAbility Project was completed with a regional conference at the Hawth Theatre in Crawley in June 2007 with guest speakers from around the UK and showcasing the CreatAbility project and other examples of good practice from the region. The conference was well attended, drawing 60 delegates from West Sussex and the wider south east region.

Training Project – 2007

From previous projects it had been found that the most effective form of training is where nursery practitioners are first able to observe artists working with children in a setting, to then try out some of these ideas at their own setting, giving them an opportunity to follow up and ask further questions and refine their approach.

Three artists were employed to lead a training programme at four Children and Family Centres with practitioners from surrounding nurseries invited to observe and then take the practice back to their own settings with follow-up sessions with the artists.

Open Sesame Project

The project took an enquiry based approach, centred on this question:

How can skills sharing between artists and early years practitioners have a positive impact on children’s creative development and the early years setting?

The question was explored by bringing together a group of eight early years practitioners and eight artists as a collaborative group that participated in a programme of five masterclasses with leading practitioners who create performance work for very young audiences – including Oily Cart and Lyngo Theatre. The rationale for inviting practitioners from this field was that performance work includes many art forms and needs an understanding of young children’s perspectives in order to engage its audience.

The masterclasses provided support for this group to collaborate with each other, and acted as a source of inspiration for that collaboration. The early years practitioners and artists were paired up and took ideas back to their settings in order to challenge and develop their practice.

Three of the settings were funded by Creative Partnerships Sussex and Surrey as part of a Themed Enquiry Programme and were able to develop their work more fully because of this additional support.

At the end of the project, sharing sessions with parents or other staff members were held, and one was visited by the Children and Families Minister, Tim Laughton MP.

Unexpected Outcomes

A benefit of working with Creative Partnerships Sussex and Surrey was that closer links could be made with nurseries in Hastings who were following a three year Change School project. A joint publication showcasing the work of the Change School project and the Open Sesame project will be available as an e-book from the end of 2011.

Working with Earlyarts has presented another opportunity to link up work across county boundaries – the professional development day in September 2011 was held in St Leonards, and an article about ‘Beach School’ that combines the East Sussex experiences with work developed at Bognor Regis Nursery School in West Sussex is being published in Montessori International magazine at the end of 2011.