11th February 2022
HEADLINES
By James Saunders
WHY ARE ARTS AND CULTURE IMPORTANT IN EDUCATION?
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Off the back of the successful Dance Show on Tuesday this week I would like to highlight the importance of providing young people with enrichment opportunities to complement their academic programmes. The beaming smiles from our learners at the end of this week’s show demonstrated the power of focusing on both success and happiness. As I have said in the past I believe that a well rounded education must include opportunities to develop Cultural and Social Capital. Both these things were in abundance on Tuesday night at the Dance Show. I would like to thank those of you that attended. The staff at Honywood have been working hard over the course of the year to design enrichment opportunities for all our learners. Coming up later this term we have our first post-pandemic Enrichment Week. Our staff have worked hard to organise a range of opportunities and I hope that our learners embrace the chance to develop their own Cultural and Social Capital. ENRICHMENT AND CULTURAL CAPITAL AT HONYWOOD “Each child has a spark inside him or her. It is the responsibility of the people and institutions around each child to find what would ignite that spark” Howard Gardner. The words of Howard Gardner chime very well
with this week’s theme: Enrichment. I have mentioned before that the real impact of the pandemic in schools and wider society has been the decimation of the arts and cultural sectors. The aim of our upcoming Enrichment Programme is to create opportunities for our learners to develop their Cultural and Social Capital and close the gaps that the pandemic has created. I recently read that Cultural Capital can be likened to a kind of currency or credit score. If you have a good credit score you can access more things. Our approach to the development of Cultural Capital is just like this. We believe that developing this in our learners will place them at an advantage in the future and will support them to access their learning on a deeper level. I have often thought that the only difference between state and private schools is the advantage they provide regarding the development of Cultural and Social Capital the connections, the opportunities and the networks. I firmly believe that everyone should be entitled to those same opportunities. We have already been able to run a range of successful Enrichment activities this year such as: C7 and C8 Activity day at Danbury; C9 Graphics Day at Colchester Zoo; C11 Made Training Workshop and Careers Fair; Geography Live and Winter Concert and Sports Day. I am now pleased to share some of the confirmed activities that will be taking place across all cohorts over the rest of the academic year.