The Decorated School: Re⁠-⁠evaluating the Role of Art in the Classroom

Dunstable Reel by Philip King is a brightly coloured assemblage of large jagged and curved sheets of steel that sit in the Tate gallery in London – an appropriate environment, you might think, for the work of the renowned modernist sculptor. But another version of Dunstable Reel can be found a very different environment, and one that, suggests Dr Jeremy Howard of the University of St Andrews, King considered to be a more successful site for his work. For more than 40 years, Dunstable Reel has been at the heart of Countesthorpe Community College, Leicestershire. Sitting in the middle of the comprehensive school, which took an innovative, non-hierarchical approach to education when it was built in 1970, with its classrooms spread out in a pineapple shape to encourage interrelated learning, Dunstable Reel forms the backdrop to students’ lessons, a kind ‘silent teacher’. Rather than art being confined to a gallery or museum, students grow up with it, walking past and touching it everyday. It’s an acknowledgement that learning goes on beyond four walls, outside the classroom and defined subject areas.

The Decorated School, a three-year research network founded as a collaboration between the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and the Faculty of Art History at the University of St Andrews, is aiming to re-evaluate the role of artworks such as these in school buildings and look at how teachers have responded differently to them over time. At a research seminar held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, at the end of June, Dr Catherine Burke, Senior Lecturer in History of Education at the University of Cambridge, described the project as “challenging the disciplinary boundaries and the divisions that have been set up historically between one thing and another in the academy”. She explained: “Traditionally, the things which are associated with the small people we call children, and teachers (who are primarily women), are not thought about first in terms of value and the arts, but school buildings carry messages about the values of the time and how pupils were seen at the time. There is a relationship between educational ideas and school buildings.”

Art has long been incorporated into school buildings, and enthusiasm was particularly high in the mid-twentieth century, when many new schools were built, and murals and sculptures were used as a way of distinguishing everyday, ordinary-looking buildings. For example, between 1957 and 1965, London County Council had a patronage scheme, commissioning artworks for schools by artists such as Peter Peri, who developed new materials such as ‘pericrete’ (a mixture of concrete and polyster) and believed that art had the power to change society.

The seminar demonstrated how artworks in schools can be both abstract and representational, educational and fun, from a play crocodile by Austin Wright, designed to be clambered over, to a mural by Anthony Hollaway telling the story St George and the Dragon and another by the same artist, for a stairwell, inspired by the behaviour of atoms. Hollaway’s intricate 1961 concrete mural Sculpted Maths, at King Edward VII Community College, Coalville, even uses mathematical formula as its basis and functions as a ‘permanent maths teacher’.

At the seminar, archivist Claire Mayoh from the Henry Moore Institute shared a collection of artefacts relating to art in schools from the Institute’s extensive archive, explaining: “Art at certain periods and in certain times really was a key consideration in the school environment.” For example, in the 1960s, Leicestershire Education Authority made the forward-thinking decision to use art to enhance the school environment and enrich students’ education. The county built up a collection of artworks, often by recent graduates, which could be loaned to schools, and encouraged schools to buy their own artworks which could be shared with other schools.

Leicestershire Director of Education Stewart Mason believed that art could improve quality of life, foster inventiveness and creativity and inspire liveliness and vitality in schoolchildren. Interviewed in 1968 for a catalogue for an exhibition of the county’s collection at Whitechapel Gallery in London, he recommended a percentage of the cost of the construction (or refurbishment) of public buildings be dedicated to the patronage of art, and also advocated schools adopt a lending scheme for students to borrow art to display in their own homes. He explained: “It’s not much good lecturing about art and design. These things must be experienced. Lectures on clothes won’t keep you warm; it is the wearing of them that counts. It is more important to have good works of art in public places where people daily congregate than in museums. Of all such places schools have the greatest potential. Members of the public do not have to go to museums, but they are frequently entering schools in one capacity or another. Therefore schools deserve lively works of quality.”

“Right from the start we said we were not going to buy down for children, in the sense of seeking out pictures of engines and football matches for boys or dolls and pussy cats for girls. Every work had to stand on its intrinsic merits, as a work of art, according to the judgement used at the time.”

Unfortunately, murals in schools have a long history of being covered up, plastered over, or removed altogether as fashions were updated and attitudes towards education changed. Now, they are being rediscovered, researched and restored (although many are in buildings at risk of demolition), and members of the Decorated School network have been talking to teachers, students and parents, past and present, about the part that artworks played in their experiences of school. Dr Jeremy Howard: “Murals connect with the real world of teachers, parents and students. Parents in particular are interested in this project.”

The Decorated School: Re⁠-⁠evaluating the Role of Art in the Classroom

Dunstable Reel by Philip King is a brightly coloured assemblage of large jagged and curved sheets of steel that sit in the Tate gallery in London – an appropriate environment, you might think, for the work of the renowned modernist sculptor. But another version of Dunstable Reel can be found a very different environment, and one that, suggests Dr Jeremy Howard of the University of St Andrews, King considered to be a more successful site for his work. For more than 40 years, Dunstable Reel has been at the heart of Countesthorpe Community College, Leicestershire. Sitting in the middle of the comprehensive school, which took an innovative, non-hierarchical approach to education when it was built in 1970, with its classrooms spread out in a pineapple shape to encourage interrelated learning, Dunstable Reel forms the backdrop to students’ lessons, a kind ‘silent teacher’. Rather than art being confined to a gallery or museum, students grow up with it, walking past and touching it everyday. It’s an acknowledgement that learning goes on beyond four walls, outside the classroom and defined subject areas.

The Decorated School, a three-year research network founded as a collaboration between the Faculty of Education at the University of Cambridge and the Faculty of Art History at the University of St Andrews, is aiming to re-evaluate the role of artworks such as these in school buildings and look at how teachers have responded differently to them over time. At a research seminar held at the Henry Moore Institute, Leeds, at the end of June, Dr Catherine Burke, Senior Lecturer in History of Education at the University of Cambridge, described the project as “challenging the disciplinary boundaries and the divisions that have been set up historically between one thing and another in the academy”. She explained: “Traditionally, the things which are associated with the small people we call children, and teachers (who are primarily women), are not thought about first in terms of value and the arts, but school buildings carry messages about the values of the time and how pupils were seen at the time. There is a relationship between educational ideas and school buildings.”

Art has long been incorporated into school buildings, and enthusiasm was particularly high in the mid-twentieth century, when many new schools were built, and murals and sculptures were used as a way of distinguishing everyday, ordinary-looking buildings. For example, between 1957 and 1965, London County Council had a patronage scheme, commissioning artworks for schools by artists such as Peter Peri, who developed new materials such as ‘pericrete’ (a mixture of concrete and polyster) and believed that art had the power to change society.

The seminar demonstrated how artworks in schools can be both abstract and representational, educational and fun, from a play crocodile by Austin Wright, designed to be clambered over, to a mural by Anthony Hollaway telling the story St George and the Dragon and another by the same artist, for a stairwell, inspired by the behaviour of atoms. Hollaway’s intricate 1961 concrete mural Sculpted Maths, at King Edward VII Community College, Coalville, even uses mathematical formula as its basis and functions as a ‘permanent maths teacher’.

At the seminar, archivist Claire Mayoh from the Henry Moore Institute shared a collection of artefacts relating to art in schools from the Institute’s extensive archive, explaining: “Art at certain periods and in certain times really was a key consideration in the school environment.” For example, in the 1960s, Leicestershire Education Authority made the forward-thinking decision to use art to enhance the school environment and enrich students’ education. The county built up a collection of artworks, often by recent graduates, which could be loaned to schools, and encouraged schools to buy their own artworks which could be shared with other schools.

Leicestershire Director of Education Stewart Mason believed that art could improve quality of life, foster inventiveness and creativity and inspire liveliness and vitality in schoolchildren. Interviewed in 1968 for a catalogue for an exhibition of the county’s collection at Whitechapel Gallery in London, he recommended a percentage of the cost of the construction (or refurbishment) of public buildings be dedicated to the patronage of art, and also advocated schools adopt a lending scheme for students to borrow art to display in their own homes. He explained: “It’s not much good lecturing about art and design. These things must be experienced. Lectures on clothes won’t keep you warm; it is the wearing of them that counts. It is more important to have good works of art in public places where people daily congregate than in museums. Of all such places schools have the greatest potential. Members of the public do not have to go to museums, but they are frequently entering schools in one capacity or another. Therefore schools deserve lively works of quality.”

“Right from the start we said we were not going to buy down for children, in the sense of seeking out pictures of engines and football matches for boys or dolls and pussy cats for girls. Every work had to stand on its intrinsic merits, as a work of art, according to the judgement used at the time.”

Unfortunately, murals in schools have a long history of being covered up, plastered over, or removed altogether as fashions were updated and attitudes towards education changed. Now, they are being rediscovered, researched and restored (although many are in buildings at risk of demolition), and members of the Decorated School network have been talking to teachers, students and parents, past and present, about the part that artworks played in their experiences of school. Dr Jeremy Howard: “Murals connect with the real world of teachers, parents and students. Parents in particular are interested in this project.”