Recently,I was asked to run a workshop at a local secondary school. It’s the second one I have been invited to work with in the past few months, and both times the workshops were made possible by funding through Upland, a local arts organisation.
The workshop came about through a chance meeting with a local art teacher. We began talking about art education in secondary schools and found ourselves discussing the inconsistency in teaching, funding and resources between the state and private systems.
It saddened me to hear that while private schools can have stand-alone ceramics departments with a team of specialist staff dedicated to teaching within them, the funding for the creative arts in state schools can be so woefully low. The teacher’s time is so stretched that even if a school is fortunate enough to have a ceramics specialist in their team, they are unlikely to have the time or materials budget to do anything that would give the pupils a real sense of the joys of making with clay.
For example, I spoke to another state school
