An Education through Art: Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the National Arts Education Archive

Every year, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, just outside Wakefield, welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors. You can spend hours, even days, there, exploring the sculptures scattered throughout its grounds and buildings. With so much to see, it’s easy to miss one of the smaller galleries, tucked away next to a former stately home. Overlooking Bretton Hall, the gallery in the Lawrence Batley Centre showcases a changing selection from the collections of the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA).

The archive’s collections represent two of the major developments in twentieth-century art education. The Child Art movement of the early twentieth-century argued for the recognition of children’s innate capabilities as artists, and advocated their freedom of self-expression. The Basic Design movement, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and was inspired by Bauhaus ideas, sought to give all students a grounding in basic concepts such as line, colour and form. It superseded the Child Art movement and strongly influenced art foundation courses. The NAEA contains important materials relating to both movements – including the Child Art collection of Sir Alec Clegg, the influential post-war Director of Education for the West Riding.

The location of the archive is highly significant; it was first established in the attics of Bretton Hall, an eighteenth-century Palladian mansion, in 1985, before moving to the Lawrence Batley Centre, purpose-built by celebrated architectural practice BDP, in 1991. These buildings were at the centre of Bretton Hall College of Education. After being requisitioned during the war, Bretton Hall and its extensive grounds was sold by its owner, the Viscount of Allendale (after being stripped of many of the ornate fittings), to the West Riding County Council in 1948. The following year, Alec Clegg established a teacher training college, specialising in music and art (soon to be joined by drama).

The first cohort contained school-leavers, ex-servicemen and mature students. The atmosphere was akin to an Oxbridge college, with strict curfews, dormitory accommodation and three-course dinners in formal dress, preceded by Latin grace, to which students were summoned with a gong. However, the curriculum was designed to be anything but traditional, and aimed to equip teachers with the new ethos and approaches to education which were being put into practice in post-war schools, aspiring to move away from regimentation and rote learning towards an emphasis on individuality and experimentation. Students relished the chance to partake in outdoor music-making and theatre, and the Hall’s grand surroundings provided the backdrop for puppet shows and opera productions.

Alongside strengthening their specialisms, and being bussed to West Riding schools to undertake teaching practice, students studied modern English Literature, education, religion, art history and ‘movement’. There was a programme of distinguished visiting speakers, such as the poet and art critic Herbert Read and the dance teacher Rudolf Laban. Students were encouraged to raise their awareness of their surroundings through observational drawing and environmental science, and able to borrow camping equipment in order to explore the northern countryside.

In the 1950s and 1960s the college expanded to train science and maths teachers and new buildings were added, including an experimental theatre, science wing, music block, canteen, gymnasium, library, and a painting studio named after artist and Basic Design pioneer Victor Pasmore. Despite being modern in appearance and reflecting contemporary architectural styles, such as flat roofs, varnished wood and full-length windows, these additions to the campus were sensitive to their environment and incorporated artefacts salvaged from Yorkshire’s built heritage, such as a carved head from a Victorian arcade in Bradford, and another from York Guild Hall. New ‘hostels’ opened to house students in the early 1960s, reinforcing the link to their surroundings by taking their names from features of the park, as well as local places. In 1977, the foundations were laid for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park when Peter Murray, a lecturer in Art Education, held an open-air sculpture exhibition in the grounds of the college, hoping to engage children in art; exhibitors included the Yorkshire sculptor Austin Wright.

As well as training a generation of arts teachers, Bretton Hall’s illustrious alumni include the creators of the League of Gentleman and the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson. An alumni group holds reunions and takes an active interest in the history and future of the campus.

I spent some time at the NAEA during the research for my PhD, which took as its subject Pictures for Schools, a post-war scheme to get artworks into schools which ran between 1947 and 1969. Pictures for Schools was organised in the name of the Society for Education through Art (SEA), a nationwide organisation of art teachers interested in progressive educational methods. The NAEA contains the records of the SEA; I looked at minute books, bulletins and copies of its magazine, Athene, to get a sense of how the exhibitions were organised, how they were publicised, reported and evaluated, and the relationships between those involved and the educational debates and ideas which were current at the time.

What makes the archive such a rich resource isn’t just its beautiful setting or physical collections. It’s supported by a number of volunteers, many of whom themselves were immersed in twentieth-century education. I interviewed volunteer Eric Woodward, who was long-serving Organiser of the Museum Service for the West Riding Education Authority under Alec Clegg.

In 2001, the college was taken over by the University of Leeds. The campus continued to house arts and education students before closing in 2007, despite opposition from current and former students. Bretton Hall was sold to Wakefield Council and it was proposed that Bretton Hall was turned into a hotel, spa and conference centre.

By the autumn of 2013, when I first visited the archive, the campus was abandoned and derelict. Many of the modern buildings have since been demolished. Although Bretton Hall College is no more, the legacy of the college and its founders remains, not just in the NAEA’s remarkable collections, but in Yorkshire Sculpture Park itself, which provides free and open access to the arts and the Yorkshire landscape for all.

An Education through Art: Yorkshire Sculpture Park and the National Arts Education Archive

Every year, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, just outside Wakefield, welcomes hundreds of thousands of visitors. You can spend hours, even days, there, exploring the sculptures scattered throughout its grounds and buildings. With so much to see, it’s easy to miss one of the smaller galleries, tucked away next to a former stately home. Overlooking Bretton Hall, the gallery in the Lawrence Batley Centre showcases a changing selection from the collections of the National Arts Education Archive (NAEA).

The archive’s collections represent two of the major developments in twentieth-century art education. The Child Art movement of the early twentieth-century argued for the recognition of children’s innate capabilities as artists, and advocated their freedom of self-expression. The Basic Design movement, which emerged in the mid-twentieth century, and was inspired by Bauhaus ideas, sought to give all students a grounding in basic concepts such as line, colour and form. It superseded the Child Art movement and strongly influenced art foundation courses. The NAEA contains important materials relating to both movements – including the Child Art collection of Sir Alec Clegg, the influential post-war Director of Education for the West Riding.

The location of the archive is highly significant; it was first established in the attics of Bretton Hall, an eighteenth-century Palladian mansion, in 1985, before moving to the Lawrence Batley Centre, purpose-built by celebrated architectural practice BDP, in 1991. These buildings were at the centre of Bretton Hall College of Education. After being requisitioned during the war, Bretton Hall and its extensive grounds was sold by its owner, the Viscount of Allendale (after being stripped of many of the ornate fittings), to the West Riding County Council in 1948. The following year, Alec Clegg established a teacher training college, specialising in music and art (soon to be joined by drama).

The first cohort contained school-leavers, ex-servicemen and mature students. The atmosphere was akin to an Oxbridge college, with strict curfews, dormitory accommodation and three-course dinners in formal dress, preceded by Latin grace, to which students were summoned with a gong. However, the curriculum was designed to be anything but traditional, and aimed to equip teachers with the new ethos and approaches to education which were being put into practice in post-war schools, aspiring to move away from regimentation and rote learning towards an emphasis on individuality and experimentation. Students relished the chance to partake in outdoor music-making and theatre, and the Hall’s grand surroundings provided the backdrop for puppet shows and opera productions.

Alongside strengthening their specialisms, and being bussed to West Riding schools to undertake teaching practice, students studied modern English Literature, education, religion, art history and ‘movement’. There was a programme of distinguished visiting speakers, such as the poet and art critic Herbert Read and the dance teacher Rudolf Laban. Students were encouraged to raise their awareness of their surroundings through observational drawing and environmental science, and able to borrow camping equipment in order to explore the northern countryside.

In the 1950s and 1960s the college expanded to train science and maths teachers and new buildings were added, including an experimental theatre, science wing, music block, canteen, gymnasium, library, and a painting studio named after artist and Basic Design pioneer Victor Pasmore. Despite being modern in appearance and reflecting contemporary architectural styles, such as flat roofs, varnished wood and full-length windows, these additions to the campus were sensitive to their environment and incorporated artefacts salvaged from Yorkshire’s built heritage, such as a carved head from a Victorian arcade in Bradford, and another from York Guild Hall. New ‘hostels’ opened to house students in the early 1960s, reinforcing the link to their surroundings by taking their names from features of the park, as well as local places. In 1977, the foundations were laid for the Yorkshire Sculpture Park when Peter Murray, a lecturer in Art Education, held an open-air sculpture exhibition in the grounds of the college, hoping to engage children in art; exhibitors included the Yorkshire sculptor Austin Wright.

As well as training a generation of arts teachers, Bretton Hall’s illustrious alumni include the creators of the League of Gentleman and the educationalist Sir Ken Robinson. An alumni group holds reunions and takes an active interest in the history and future of the campus.

I spent some time at the NAEA during the research for my PhD, which took as its subject Pictures for Schools, a post-war scheme to get artworks into schools which ran between 1947 and 1969. Pictures for Schools was organised in the name of the Society for Education through Art (SEA), a nationwide organisation of art teachers interested in progressive educational methods. The NAEA contains the records of the SEA; I looked at minute books, bulletins and copies of its magazine, Athene, to get a sense of how the exhibitions were organised, how they were publicised, reported and evaluated, and the relationships between those involved and the educational debates and ideas which were current at the time.

What makes the archive such a rich resource isn’t just its beautiful setting or physical collections. It’s supported by a number of volunteers, many of whom themselves were immersed in twentieth-century education. I interviewed volunteer Eric Woodward, who was long-serving Organiser of the Museum Service for the West Riding Education Authority under Alec Clegg.

In 2001, the college was taken over by the University of Leeds. The campus continued to house arts and education students before closing in 2007, despite opposition from current and former students. Bretton Hall was sold to Wakefield Council and it was proposed that Bretton Hall was turned into a hotel, spa and conference centre.

By the autumn of 2013, when I first visited the archive, the campus was abandoned and derelict. Many of the modern buildings have since been demolished. Although Bretton Hall College is no more, the legacy of the college and its founders remains, not just in the NAEA’s remarkable collections, but in Yorkshire Sculpture Park itself, which provides free and open access to the arts and the Yorkshire landscape for all.