Tales from the Edge of Town in Cambridge

Tales from the Edge of Town invited children aged 8-11yrs to tell stories about what happened in lockdown. Professional artists performed these stories to a wider audience.

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This case study is part of a series from the LGA Culture Commission

The challenge 

Children living in deprived places have many challenges to their learning which have been exacerbated by the pandemic. In Cambridge there are clear indicators of deprivation. For example, there are wards where the life expectancy is 10 years less than the rest of Cambridge or a school where the percentage of those children claiming free school meals is higher than any other. When schools were forced to teach online, the need for families and homes to support children’s learning became important. In homes where there is a limited tradition of learning, children missed out. They also missed out on the equally important activity of socialising and playing.  Teachers report that children’s emotional development has been significantly impacted by their experiences of lockdown and school time must now be devoted to developing interpersonal skills. In Cambridge there is an additional challenge, many of the cultural riches of the city are unknown. Culture is viewed as ‘not for them’, or it is just not known about. For cultural providers, these are families that are ‘easy to ignore.’ The arts, and specifically, placed-based enquiry and creative writing can offer a solution. Complex and abstract concepts like identity and belonging can be developed and children become more resilient to take up opportunity and agency. 

The solution

In New International Encounter (NIE) Theatre's programme, Tales from the Edge of Town, the children on the edge of town stood centre stage. NIE invited the children to create a large map of their local area and to populate it with themselves, their homes, the places important to them, their memories and the things that happened there. Next the children were invited to write their own stories set locally and telling events that had happened but also imagining what might have happened and what might happen. The children took on the role of storytellers documenting the places and the times they were living in. Variations on this included working with the Museum of Archaeology and Anthropology with the children taking on the role of archaeologists to tell the stories of objects from both past and present. In this way, the children were introduced to some of the cultural assets of the city. Stories were selected to be performed to a wider audience, validating their lives on a professional platform. 

In a Mongolian yurt, four actors are performing with a ukulele and a puppet

The impact

The impact of the programme can be shown in many ways, including:

How is the new approach being sustained?

Partnership working between organisations, like NIE Theatre and the University of Cambridge Museums.  

Sustained ongoing partnerships with schools. The programme has so far worked in four Cambridge Primary Schools reaching approximately 580 children. There is an ambition to increase the scale of the programme to enable more children to benefit and longer-term planning with schools to take place. All this is dependent on fundraising which is taking place with support from trusts, foundations and the city council. 

The programme aligns itself with the city council outcomes to improve general health and wellbeing and for communities to come together to bring about change. 

The programme found particular value in generating understanding for others, with feedback forms evidencing that the children empathised with what others had been going through in lockdown, with many comments noting this.  

Discussions with the city council and the local cultural education partnership are ongoing to develop ways in which the programme can be sustained and increased in scale. 

A class of children are sat in a Mongolian yurt wearing white lab coats looking towards the stage.

Lessons learned

Partnership working with a school takes time.  A period of several months is beneficial to establish a project that suits the school’s curriculum cycle. The engagement becomes more meaningful if time has been given to have several meetings with the classroom teachers in terms of practical delivery, and the headteacher in terms of the school’s strategic development. When that investment of time has been made there is a significant benefit of building the partnership long term, for example over several years. 

Everyone has a story to tell and enjoys telling it (even if they don’t want to share it publicly). 

People and children had different experiences of the pandemic.  

Places, objects and stories are great ways to bring people together and to connect and to thus inform community cohesion and resilience. Telling those stories publicly is a brilliant way to celebrate this connectedness.  

Local Cultural Education Partnerships work well to share data that identifies particular need based on statistics of how many children qualify for free school meals. 

Contact

Michael Judge, email: [email protected] 

View the Tales from the Edge of Town video