Why does Art Teachers Connect matter to me: Abigail’s Story

Get to know the head of our programme better and her journey to coming up with Art Teachers Connect.

I’m a historian, so, I’m going to take us back to the long distant past – 1995 to be exact. When I arrived at the University of Leeds, it was by a non-traditional route. I was working in museums and met someone who recognised in me the ability to teach before I did. She asked me to develop some undergraduate modules in museum studies, and I guess I have always just said yes to interesting opportunities. My own university experience, while brilliant in many ways, had also taught me two key things – there is such a thing as the class-system (I had lived in a bit of a bubble in the Yorkshire Dales before then) and that education is a massive enabler but also deeply unequal in terms of access and success.

Almost immediately, I was asked to take on the admissions tutor role at a time when, because of a university merger, we moved from recruiting 30 under-graduates a year to 200 – suddenly the job was about getting out there and explaining to mostly young people and their teachers why they should study fine art and art history at university. From the start, I was never just interested in recruiting students. Feeling like an utter outsider myself in this new world of academia, I wanted to address the ever-widening social and economic gap between those eminently capable of benefitting from our degree experiences and those who felt able to – widening participation in the creative subjects, arts and humanities. And every year, our Government made it harder, with curriculum changes, student fees, the rhetoric of subject-value etc.

Having done lots of work in schools across the UK and abroad, engaging students in Art History – the subject that I loved and had fallen into myself by mistake (that’s another blog for another day), I began to realise through working with fabulous teachers, I was missing a trick. While I got huge amounts out of working to empower individual young people, it dawned on me that by empowering their teachers, I could have an impact across time, and reach out to far greater numbers of young people who might be feeling disempowered/scared/confused by the education system.

But having been entrenched in academia for a while by this point, I made the typical error of thinking a conference was the answer! Thus, I launched the first School of Fine Art, History of Art and Cultural Studies teachers conference. Despite small numbers, we had a great day, or so I thought….

At the end of a full day of talks, I was approached by a brilliant art teacher from Bradford, Anne-Louse Quinton, our Anne-Louise as she would become, who very kindly pointed out the error of my ways. We had locked a group of art teachers in a classroom for a day, in a building full of studios and art making…why had we not allowed them to break free??? Be careful what you ask me for, as my immediate response was to ask Anne-Louise if they would work with me on my next attempt at building a space for teachers to think through their practice about why and how we teach art and art history – and we came up with the ‘lock-in’ – one day of papers, followed by 2 days to play in the studios. We certainly could see the potential, but it was not quite yet the residential that we have come to love so much. That took the confluence of a number of events and opportunities.

Firstly, when I became Head of School my first job was to argue for and then deliver the School’s first ever bespoke space. Fine Art has been taught for over 70 years at the University of Leeds, but we had never had our own purpose-designed building. Moving to the old Department of Agriculture building on University Road, allowed us to build new studios, classrooms and technical spaces into the beautiful bones of a building designed in 1924. This space has provided the best possible ‘home’ for our project. Next, we started to think about what we might need to do to expand our numbers and open up the opportunity to come and ‘play’ to more teachers from across the UK. That meant finding a way to fund them staying in our halls of residence, so we could utilise the evenings, minimise the time needed off-timetable, and ensure teachers could travel to us.

Getting teachers off-timetable also required us to think about how you might ‘sell’ the opportunity to leadership teams. On this, I was advised by Anne-Louise and the next member of our crack team of tutors recruited to the party – Sarah Phillips. Sarah and I had been working together (with her fellow Art History in Schools founder, Caroline Osbourne) on how to increase participation in art history, particularly in the state sector, and together they made it clear that we needed to ensure that everyone would leave with the resources, ideas and experience to be able to plan their next year’s teaching – hence coming up with the snappy title Plan, Prepare, Provide – PPP was born! But we needed hard cash! Luckily for us, Trevor Horsewood had just been appointed as the first campaigns manager for the Association for Art History. I had campaigned for this role with the then CEO of my learned society, and so was interested to meet this person. I invited Trevor up to the Hepworth, and we bonded. He was a boy from Grimsby, so we were united by our stories and experience of the North-South divide and the value of art and creativity. Trevor persuaded the Association to pump-prime our initiative, and we went out to recruit our first cohort. And he also introduced me to the wonder that is Susan Coles, who not only agreed to bring her expertise to the programme as a tutor, but also told all her impressively huge teacher-networks that they should sign up. The power of Twitter and the power of Susan combined, ensured we had a fantastic set of applicants, and on a Monday in July 2017, our first gang of beautiful and brilliant, but exhausted and battered art and art history teachers arrived in our gleaming new building, ready to make art, make friends and make a difference….

We have learnt from you, we have grown in ambition and applicants, we have persuaded participants to become tutors (I’m thinking of you Paul Raymond….) and we have worked with many of our fabulous partner organisations. We also have listened, and on your request developed the Post Graduate Certificate. We survived lock-down (and learnt we could do PPP digitally leading to our fabulous digital CPD as a way of bringing you all back together 3 times a year) and were one of the first groups back on campus. And in 2020 we persuaded the Paul Mellon Centre to come along for the journey with us as our funders and now collaborators. And so we look to the future with the launch of our bespoke website in July 2024 and our new name – Art Teachers Connect. Our ambition remains the same – to provide you and us with a community of support and exchange between art and art history teachers across the UK.

So as we move to this next exciting part of our history, what have I learnt –

Teachers are powered by kindness, but also biscuits, lots and lots of biscuits

You are doing an incredible job in an ever-increasing situation of challenge and difficulty, and most of the time you do it with smiles on your faces

When we sit on the green sofa at the end of the residential, you will have drained everything from us, but left us feeling fantastic – you empower us

I am grateful to all of you, and long may we keep going, keep learning, keep smiling.

Thank you.