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curated entirely by our Young Programmers.

Often our participants think big cultural institutions aren’t for them, but Creative Learning offers a way in and
the highlight of this work for me is witnessing the transformative impact it has on people’s lives. When asked to
describe the programme in one word, one of our Young Poets, Kareem Parkins-Brown, chose ‘empowerment’.

Raising questions
There have been major changes over the past ten years, including a significant change in understanding of what
learning is when it truly takes root and breathes life into a cultural institution. The big shifting point has been a
movement away from the frequent perception of learning and education as ‘adding value’, towards a more
intentional embracing of its place at the very heart of an organisation’s purpose.

More often than not learning departments are now the engine rooms that drive and stimulate the big questions
for cultural institutions. Questions such as: Who gets to make and produce culture? Who gets to decide what and
who cultural space is for? And who gets to decide what culture is anyway? By the sheer nature of our work –
operating across sectors, communities and spaces – it is both our role and duty to lift the lid on these big,
sometimes uncomfortable, questions.

Certainly our work in partnership with teachers, young people, artists and community organisations has taught us
much along the way. Today, these partnerships inform how we work at every stage and provide the conditions for
genuine exchange, co-creation and two-way learning. When they are working at their best – as for example, our
award-winning three-year partnership with The Garden School in Hackney, a specialist school for learners with
autism, they move on our own practice in some way too.

Future solutions
In many ways we are settling into our next decade with a greater level of confidence and purpose. We know that
there is – and will continue to be – global demand for creative people in the workplace, and yet arts learning in
schools is on the decline: a Fabian Society report shows that two thirds (68%) of primary school teachers in
England say there is less arts education being taught now than in 2010, and half (49%) say the quality of that
education has got worse.

Clearly there is no silver bullet or simple solution, and as a department we are thinking about the types of
partnerships and delivery models that will most powerfully amplify our impact over the next ten years.

But if I were to answer this question more abstractly, I find myself going back to the start. When we think about
what forms the very basis of our DNA as a joint division of the Barbican and the Guildhall School, we find
ourselves uniquely placed to ask: How can cultural spaces becomes spaces of learning? And how can learning
spaces become cultural spaces? And does the future solution for our sectors emerge somewhere from the meeting
point between the two?

I remain enormously passionate about that point of intersection between cultural and educational space – a
meeting point in which we see most acutely the possibility and opportunity for change, agency and cultural
democracy. That space in-between is intrinsic to us. It’s where we have come from – and it’s fundamental to
where we are going – and it’s where we really get to ask the big questions.

Jenny Mollica is Director of Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning.

Find out more about Barbican Guildhall Creative Learning programmes at barbican.org.uk/take-part