Making a Song and Dance About Creative Learning

By Anna Smyth

BY THE time they reach adulthood, most people remember their school musical productions with nothing but the most excruciating embarrassment.

Nights spent warbling out of tune to Surrey with a Fringe on Top or There Ain’t Nothing Like a Dame are, for most, a memory at which we look back and laugh, safe only in the knowledge that at least we were enthusiastically hopeless.

But one group of schools in Edinburgh is aiming to change all that, and make performing arts a central focus for children’s wider educational experience. On Sunday, the Erskine Stewart’s Melville Schools (ESMS) will launch its new performing arts centre, which is housed in the converted assembly hall at Stewart’s Melville College.

The opening concert will be a joint performance by the school choirs and the Scottish Chamber Orchestra (SCO), as well as SCO performances of works by Beethoven and Wagner, conducted by Garry Walker.

The state-of-the-art centre, which has cost more than GBP 3.5 million, features the best of professional lighting and sound equipment, computer-controlled seating banks and can be subdivided into three acoustically separate venues to house every type of performance event.

It will operate as a versatile facility – for everything from theatre and concerts to school assemblies – but will also be run as a community arts venue for amateur and professional arts organisations. ESMS hopes to welcome users from other schools and has already generated a significant community fund to subsidise use.

But, as impressive as the facility is as a physical presence, its creation raises the issue of how integral performing arts should be to the educational experience of Scotland’s school children.

David Gray, the principal of ESMS, says music, drama and performance are crucial for a child’s well-rounded development and should play a central role in school life. In addition to the schools’ own musical and dramatic productions, the ESMS pupils have also participated in more than 450 performances of touring West End productions such as Joseph and the Amazing Technicolor Dreamcoat and Chitty Chitty Bang Bang.

“Developing our children’s self-confidence is the highest priority,” he says, “as well as teaching them to have high expectations of themselves. We want our pupils to learn to work as a team and to discuss ideas. One of the best ways for them to achieve that is to practise performing arts.”

The ESMS is made up of three schools – Stewart’s Melville College for boys, the Mary Erskine School for girls (which share a co- educational sixth form) and a co-educational junior school. The decision to house the centre within the boys’ campus was no accident, but a deliberate choice to counteract the pervading perception that music and acting are more feminine pursuits.

“We felt it was very important to let our ten-year-old boys know that there is life beyond sport,” says Gray. “We wanted them to come here and think, ‘Music, drama and performance must matter to this school, because of the quality of the facilities, so those pursuits should matter to me too.’ We needed a physical presence on the site to highlight that boys and girls can gain equally from these activities and that we value excellence on the stage as highly as we do excellence on the games field.”

The Scottish Executive commissioned research into the importance of arts in education and Raymond McDonald, a psychologist at Glasgow Caledonian University, was one of those to conduct the study.

“Everyone can express themselves through artistic abilities, and in development, music and drama are crucial areas of growth,” says McDonald, who also edits the journal Psychology of Music. “Among adolescents, music is often a badge of identity for how they communicate who they are to the world. If arts are delivered in the right context, they can be a fantastic way to explore individuality, creativity and self-expression.”

Howard Blake, who wrote The Snowman, agrees that musical and dramatic performances can develop in children a side not always catered for by the academic curriculum. That helps to explain why he composed The Land of Counterpane for the schools and invited pupils to record the work professionally with the SCO.

“Performing in a choir or orchestra is the greatest way of learning how to function socially,” he says. “The experience of being part of a major musical or dramatic work is a revelation of the unlimited and inspiring possibilities that can be achieved by co- operation. This is also true of drama, which is the finest experience for learning how to present oneself in life without embarrassment, to learn how to speak in public and to understand how other people think and function, especially when under pressure.”

So if music, drama and public performance are so beneficial for a child’s sense of confidence and ability, why are they not more central to the broad educational experience? And what could be done to make them more so? The answer is assessment.

“Many of the teachers we interviewed for the Scottish Executive said the constant drive for assessment diminishes their ability to deliver an artistic agenda,” says McDonald. “They all felt arts were crucial for children, but if external assessors were visiting the school, or if exams were approaching, it was the first part of school life to get sidelined.”

Bryan Lewis, headmaster of Mary Erskine and Stewart’s Melville junior school and vice-principal, says more could be done to encourage these skills and experiences in all schools: “Many schools will only push those activities in which they are measured. As long as schools are measured on exam results, they will focus on academic achievement. That makes sense in the current system but it does mean extracurricular activities, ones that can be so beneficial to a child’s wider development, can be neglected. We are determined that will never be the case in our schools.”

e-mail sstantons@esmgc.com or call 0131-311 1111 for tickets (GBP 12) to the concert at 2:30pm on Sunday 23 September.

(c) 2007 Scotsman, The. Provided by ProQuest Information and Learning. All rights Reserved.