Finding Sustainability
University-community collaborations focused 
on arts in health

This article describes a number of community-based arts in health 

projects in schools and disadvantaged communities in Northern 

England that connect with the interdisciplinary research interests 

of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham University. In 

2000, we were invited to become associates of the newly established 

centre (at that time, known as the Centre for Arts and Humanities 

in Health and Medicine). We brought with us a portfolio of arts 

and health projects, underpinned by a growing funded research 

agenda. White took up the post of Senior Research Fellow in Arts 

in Health and Robson became Associate Artist for Arts in Health 

and Education. We have a background in arts management and 

practice, often within community health contexts, and with a 

pedagogic role of facilitating emotional health and wellbeing in 

schools and communities. Over the last 10 years we have worked 

to connect the centre’s interdisciplinary research interest in what 

makes for human flourishing with community-based arts in health 

projects that can advance participatory action research and test 

hypotheses. We are particularly interested both to examine and 

demonstrate good practice in community-based arts in health and 

to assess what factors may help to make the work sustainable for 

long-term research study. 

To assist us in our inquiry, we have so far been able to access 

through the university several tranches of outreach development 

funding and ‘seedcorn’ research grants, supplemented by personal 

awards of fellowships from the National Endowment for Science, 

Technology and Arts. This interest and support have helped us to 

develop an intellectual framework for arts in community health 

and examine its practice internationally, as well as providing a 

promotional platform and other funding opportunities. University 

involvement has also, however, set us a two-fold challenge: 

to sustain the work both as meaningful arts activity for the 

participants and as fertile ground for inquiry by researchers. This 

is carefully nurtured community work and cannot be set up just 

to test out hypotheses, and it requires longitudinal thinking in its 

practical development, if not also in its research methodology.

Gateways: International  
Journal of Community  
Research and Engagement
Vol 4 (2011): 48–64 
© UTSePress and the authors

ISSN 1836-3393

Mike White 
Mary Robson
Centre for Medical Humanities, Durham University



49 | Gateways | White & Robson

In this article we set out some lessons learned from our 

practice, and examine how community-based arts in health is 

relevant in a broader policy context of education, social cohesion 

and public health. At the core of our work is assisting schools 

and communities to develop new traditions that celebrate health 

awareness and occasions of transition through the power of 

resonant imagery and the reflective practice that comes from 

relationship-based work. 

THE ‘HAPPY HEARTS’ LANTERNS: A CASE EXAMPLE
The use of handmade lanterns in the UK for celebratory processions 

originated with the theatre company Welfare State International, 

with whom we worked in the 1980s. Lantern parades have been 

a connecting thread of imagery throughout our many years 

of involvement in arts and health projects. They are, literally, 

occasions to view a community in another light. Sometimes 

they are one-off events, but in many cases they become annual 

celebrations and form part of wider programs of work that connect 

arts, health education and community development. They can 

provide small-scale but significant practical instances of how social 

capital is produced and built upon. Lantern events offer a tangible 

image of how that ‘capital’ is in circulation in the community. 

They create potent, resonating images for particular times and 

places, and literally throw light upon what makes for healthy 

living. Every neighbourhood should have one.

One such event, the ‘Happy Hearts’ celebratory lantern 

parade for the Wrekenton estate in Gateshead, became an annual 

event that took place each March from 1994 to 2006. Core support 

came from Gateshead Libraries and Arts, with a succession of 

charitable trusts and sponsors providing one-off grants. From the 

outset the event involved hundreds of local children, their families, 

voluntary agencies, churches and the district health promotion 

team. Wrekenton is an area that is regarded as a ‘black spot’ in 

terms of both its health profile and its media image as a rough 

place. Yet over the years the procession became the distinctive 

event in the local calendar, a metaphorical ‘screening’ and 

celebration of community health. 

During the 1990s we believed that we were helping to 

develop in Wrekenton a model example of practice in community-

based arts in health. This model addressed both emotional health 

and physical health through a focus on creating participatory 

arts activities in a community with just about the worst morbidity 

record in England for coronary disease. After 12 years of running 

a highly successful and influential schools and community project 

channelling health promotion around the annual sculptural 

lanterns parade, we had to resign ourselves, for pragmatic and 

complex reasons, to closing it down. Our letter of 27 February 2006 

to the new head teacher of the school where the project workshop 

was based explained why: 



50 | Gateways | White & Robson

The Happy Hearts Lanterns Parade began in 1994 and has been 

a hugely successful venture. From humble beginnings, it became 

a nationally renowned project and example of good arts in health 

practice, featured in conference presentations around the world and 

a seminar in Downing Street. Commissioned by Gateshead Council, 

it transformed from a single event into a robust, annual tradition. 

Local people took it to their hearts, commemorating births and deaths 

through it and becoming expert lantern makers in the process. Annual 

core funding from Gateshead Libraries and Arts was supplemented by 

grants from charitable trusts, health services and sponsorship. Latterly, 

the Council grant was somewhat diminished, but their arts team 

provided invaluable technical support year after year. Happy Hearts 

brought well over £130,000 of funding into Wrekenton over those 

years, and inspired much more, including the community of Southwick 

in Sunderland who now have their own procession, Catch the Light. 

Over the years it has provided an important case study for research 

into the role of local arts development in addressing health inequalities. 

The aim of Happy Hearts was to work with the community network to 

help promote inner strength, health and development on every level. 

It is about sharing. It can only happen in the context of a constantly 

developing tapestry of relationships. Sadly, for whatever reasons, Happy 

Hearts is no longer supported by a strong local network and therefore 

cannot continue. It would be a contradiction in terms for it to do so.

There was no reply to this letter, which in itself spoke 

volumes for the sorry state into which the initiative had 

deteriorated. When the event began, there was a wealth of 

networking in Wrekenton. Each year, teachers, health professionals 

and local artists learned how to make lanterns at an open day 

held for all interested parties. Reciprocally, the project team 

was invited to attend local meetings where schools, churches, 

community education, social services, the youth service, libraries, 

health visitors and the police were all represented. These meetings 

generated more support for the project – a second primary school 

became involved and a teenage mothers group signed up to make 

images for the procession; a local computer group produced the 

poster and the community police officer would organise the route 

and join us on the parade. 

Over the project’s last few years, however, the picture 

became quite different. It had become a battle to get the event 

to happen at all, for lots of reasons, not simply lack of funding, 

though that was proving more and more difficult. The biggest 

concern had been the falling off of the partner agencies that 

provided year-round community contact and helped us facilitate 

a meaningful development of the project as it generated its own 

participant-driven narrative. There were other reasons, too: broad 

community network meetings no longer happened; changes in 

schools and agencies meant less of an emphasis on the emotional 

and social development aspects of the project; the police started 

to charge a considerable fee to come on the parade; and, whilst 



51 | Gateways | White & Robson

people from other communities were coming to observe and be 

involved in the project, it was evident that fewer new local people 

were signing up to its potential. 

The shutting down of Happy Hearts was felt as a personal 

disappointment to us as we had embedded our belief in the 

potency of arts in community health within the spirit of this event. 

Its long duration had assisted the evolution of our understanding 

of arts in community health as a distinct area of activity operating 

mainly outside acute health-care settings, being characterised 

by the use of participatory arts to promote health, as described 

in White’s (2009) book on practice and research in this field. The 

practice of arts in community health was pioneered in the UK in 

the late 1980s through sporadic pilot projects placing local arts 

development in health promotion and primary care contexts. It 

has since grown and expanded to embrace community health on 

a broad front, hooking up with multi-agency initiatives to address 

the social determinants of health through partnership work. In 

communities and schools in disadvantaged areas it has combined 

creative activities with health education and amassed positive 

testimony from participants as to its value.

The big challenge for arts in community health has been 

to sustain projects for long enough to understand and consolidate 

the practice and to undertake longitudinal research that can 

utilise and analyse participants’ testimony within a more rigorous 

ethnographic framework. Inevitably it proved difficult for a 

parlous community arts project such as ours, reliant on successive 

one-off project funds, to maintain the necessary on-the-ground 

partnerships, attract strategic support, and remain vital and 

engaging within a generational timeframe. 

PLACING ARTS IN HEALTH IN A BROADER POLICY 
CONTEXT
From a policy point of view, the extinguishing of Wrekenton’s 

lanterns in 2006 was perhaps unfortunately timed. In the public 

health field, interest was growing in the ‘health assets model’ 

(Morgan & Ziglio 2007). This model contends that, historically, 

health promotion has worked on a deficit model that focused on 

the problems and needs of communities to be addressed through 

health resources. An asset model, on the other hand, looks at 

communities’ capability and capacity to identify problems and 

activate their own solutions, so building their self-esteem. Public 

health practitioners were beginning to argue that salutogenic (or 

health generating) factors that build health awareness through 

social cohesion and personal meaning are just as important as 

pathogenic (or sickness generating) processes, particularly as risk 

factors account for only 40–50 per cent of early mortality (Harrison 

et al. 2004). Some researchers went so far as to suggest that 

identifiable health assets in a community could include wisdom, 

creativity, talent and enthusiasm, and that these revealed cultural 

and values-based potentiality. Tapping into this potential would 



52 | Gateways | White & Robson

require new training and reorientation of existing social welfare 

and economic delivery and development systems which recognised 

that ‘community cohesion may be a very significant value-based 

asset with cultural determinants’ (Harrison, Kasapi & Levin 2004, 

p. 9). 

Harnessing political will in support of the health assets 

approach has been more gradual and some of the excitement 

generated in the public health arena by the idea has been lost in 

translation. The foundations of the coalition government’s ‘Big 

Society’ plans in 2010 were, ironically, already being laid in the 

final term of the Labour government. A framework that could 

practically assist a health assets approach in public health work 

with communities was set out in the Department of Communities 

and Local Government White Paper (2006), which proposed 

arrangements for local authorities to lead on health and wellbeing 

issues in local communities. It aimed to shift the pattern of health-

care provision to prevention, with particular attention to complex 

issues of social exclusion. The White Paper had an accompanying 

strategy which paved the way for the current culture shift in 

commissioning by providing opportunities for the voluntary 

sector to bid to run programs and services. This was a significant 

strategic change that could assist in introducing arts projects into 

community care partnerships, based on Local Area Agreements 

forged between local authorities, primary care trusts and other 

partners. It placed emphasis on the voluntary sector’s ability to 

assist in needs assessment and capacity-building in communities, 

and advocated more joint workforce development (Department 

of Health 2006). Further government support for this shift was 

provided with the publication of the Department of Communities 

and Local Government White Paper on Empowerment (2008), 

which set out how the untapped talent of communities could 

be unleashed to create improvements to public services, local 

accountability and opportunities for enterprise. Wrekenton’s 

Happy Hearts missed the boat on this purchaser/provider crossing, 

possibly because it was a schools-based project which lacked local 

leadership at the time. Elsewhere in North East England, some 

social prescribing schemes that were using the arts to address 

mental health and ageing fared better.

Before this article gets mired in ‘what ifs’ and ‘what could 

have beens’ it is time to report an extraordinary development 

in Wrekenton that occurred in 2010. A group of residents on the 

estate approached the local authority and the primary care trust 

for help to reinstate the annual lanterns event after its five-year 

hiatus. These were new parents who had participated as children 

in the early parades, and who now wanted to revive the event for 

the benefit of their children. They wanted it not just to provide 

some seasonal festivity in the social calendar but precisely because 

they grasped its potency as a health promotion tool. They were 

particularly concerned about recent evidence that Wrekenton had 

double the national average of smokers at 43 per cent, and that 

a third of young women on the estate smoked. Furthermore, in 



53 | Gateways | White & Robson

Gateshead the pre-mortality rates from cancer were among the 

highest in England, at twice the national average. As one resident 

commented to the local paper, ‘we wanted to do something to 

bring down these terrible figures in a way that educated but didn’t 

patronise people and that would bring the community closer 

together. There used to be a Lantern Parade that went through 

parts of Gateshead that started in the mid-1990s to raise awareness 

of health matters such as heart disease, so it seemed like an 

ideal way for us to address the issue of smoking’ (Chronicle Extra 

2010). The newly formed Lantern Parade Committee subsequently 

fundraised for an event and engaged artists to work with the 

community on a parade for national No Smoking Day in March 

2011.

We had thought the Lantern Parade project was finished, 

blighted as we explained in our letter by the collapse of the local 

organisations’ network and the schools’ support that we had 

seen as central to its sustainability. The surprise revival of the 

event helped us see that there were other overlooked factors that 

needed to be taken into account in the research and evaluation 

of arts in community health in respect of sustainability: namely, 

the resonance within the experience of an art work, the aesthetic 

agency of participatory arts and what we ascribe to be ‘the 

communal will’. Our logistical problems in sustaining the parades 

in Wrekenton had perhaps led us to undervalue these effects and 

to focus instead on inputs and outcomes of social capital. We had 

assumed that the community no longer wanted this event because 

the professional ‘gatekeepers’ had become so uncommitted. Yet the 

anecdotal evidence of community support, gathered in comments 

books, was often staring us in the face – for example, in the remark 

of a teacher with a heart condition who wrote: ‘when the big “heart 

of the community” lantern lit up, my heart felt better’. Similarly, 

in a nine-year-old boy’s literacy in the social determinants of 

health when he observed that ‘when the lanterns light up, everyone 

becomes my friend’. 

Key facets of the aesthetic agency of participatory arts, as 

acknowledged in an Arts Council England survey (COI 2007), 

are that they generate wellbeing and help strengthen identity, 

connection and a supportive sense of place. In parallel with 

this, there has been growing interest in the public health arena 

in Antonovsky’s theory of ‘salutogenesis’ (Lindstrom & Eriksson 

2006), which suggests that health originates in the human quest 

for coherence and a harmonious environment (Antonovsky 1979), 

a theory which could have application across the whole arts in 

health field. Through sustained programs of participatory arts, 

shared creativity can embody committed expressions of public 

health, simultaneously identifying and addressing the local and 

specific health needs in a community. Importantly, this collective 

action still proceeds from the personal, facilitating engagement 

by individuals with their own health needs, but also creating 



54 | Gateways | White & Robson

commitment to a communal will for a shared experience. This was 

recognised at the launch of the National Health Service in 1948 by 

its political architect, Aneurin Bevan:

The maintenance of public health requires a collective commitment. 

Preventative medicine, which is merely another way of saying collective 

action, builds up a system of social habits that constitute an essential 

part of what we mean by civilisation (Department of Health 2000, 

p. 4).

Bevan acknowledged that there is a cultural base to the 

health services and that we need to make this visible in order for 

the public to fully engage with it and help shape it. Yet it has taken 

half a century to realise that participatory arts could have a role 

in bringing this to light. A commitment to addressing the social 

determinants of health requires a process of engagement that goes 

beyond the health services themselves and builds alliances for 

social change. This in turn can provide a significant opportunity 

for a university to engage meaningfully with its host communities 

in the development of social capital. In Bevan’s statement there are 

glimpsed the rudiments of social capital and resilience. 

The term ‘social capital’ has become a confusing and 

overused term in assessing the impact of community development 

initiatives (McQueen-Thomson & Ziguras 2002). In the context of 

community arts, a better understanding of the social psychology 

that goes into building trust and reciprocity within communities 

may be found in a book that predates social capital theory: Lewis 

Hyde’s (1979) seminal work on art and the gift economy, The 

Gift. Hyde contrasts the sterile exchanges of commodity culture 

with the ability of an artwork or totem to bind a community 

through an evolving tradition of reciprocal generosity. Making 

art work as a social gift is at the heart of thinking and practice 

in community arts. A gift is not a commodity at all, in the sense 

that its value is perceived wholly in the transmission rather than 

in the accumulation of a good. What matters is the sentiment and 

ceremony of the process. As Hyde describes it:

When a gift passes, it becomes the binder of many wills. What gathers 

in it is not only the sentiment of generosity but the affirmation of 

individual goodwill, making of those separate parts a spiritus mundi, 

a unanimous heart, a band whose wills are focused through the lens 

of the gift. Thus the gift becomes an agent of social cohesion, and this 

again leads to the feeling that its passage increases its worth, for in 

social life at least, the whole is greater than the sum of its parts (Hyde 

1979, p. 36). 

Hyde emphasises the importance of a process of emotional 

transaction through creative participation that makes for genuine 

empowerment rather than a balance sheet deduction of how much 

social or cultural capital a community may possess.

Anthropology can provide an interesting lens for examining 

the effects of arts activities on health promotion and population 

health. In Homo aestheticus, US art critic Ellen Dissanayake 



55 | Gateways | White & Robson

(1992) argues that species-centred art is a behaviour, a biological 

necessity, which is disciplined by the need to do what feels good in 

art-making. She considers ritual and art to be socially reinforcing, 

with ceremony having evolved as a survival mechanism that 

binds people together. A distinctive quality of art that she terms 

‘making special’ is thus a form of social persuasion, turning 

what is obligatory for survival into something desirable, and 

addressing substantive communal concerns through evoking deep 

feelings. These ideas are highly relevant to the practice of arts in 

community health, and there may be a fundamental connection 

to be explored between creativity and health as a pathologically 

optimistic expression of survival. Dissanayake refers to ‘liminal’ 

transitional experiences producing ‘communitas’ (the feeling of 

community). This state of being also relates to Csíkszentmihályi’s 

(1996) theory of ‘flow’, when action and awareness fuse and 

ego is replaced by a collective sense of ‘rightness’ which can 

channel and relieve anxiety or distress. By having control of the 

process, Dissanayake argues, it becomes possible for participants 

to speculate and to see the relation of the present ceremony to 

past and future, a form of scenario building. Dissanayake (1992, 

p. 83) concludes ‘the reason art is “therapeutic” has at least as 

much to do with the fact that, unlike ordinary life, it allows us 

to order, shape and control at least a piece of the world as to 

do with the usually offered reason that it allows sublimation 

and self-expression’. It is this therapeutic effect which motivates 

participants to repeat these events, creating traditions. These 

alert us to ‘selectively valuable behaviours’, so that choice and 

community go together. 

A motivation to healthier living also proceeds from 

emotional response to reciprocal trust. Participatory arts can 

provide a channel for that to be celebrated, and artists working 

in this field consistently say that in facilitating this they want 

to make a difference to people’s health because they genuinely 

care. Artistic processes may confound the scrutiny of clinical 

examination, health policy review or evaluation technique, yet 

there is a benefit staring us intellectually in the face. The collective 

art work comes to express temporarily a shared creativity that 

still allows for personal pride of attainment, and may produce 

varied and deeply personal meanings for the participants. That is 

why participants instinctively so often ‘get it’ when professional 

observers may not. Their emotional response is the embodiment 

of meaning; a phenomenon which is now considered central to 

cognitive science. As philosopher Mark Johnson (2008, pp. 46–47) 

asserts:

We need to know how emotion binds us to the world, helps appraise 

our experience, and makes action possible. One of the surprises in 

studying these deep, pre-reflective, emotion-laden, embodied aspects of 

meaning, conceptualisation and reason is that these turn out to be the 

very processes and elements traditionally explored in aesthetics and art 

theory. 



56 | Gateways | White & Robson

Although this phenomenon may not yet be proven to have 

a replicable therapeutic effect on individual pathology, it does 

demonstrate how a benign communion around health awareness 

can be created and sustained in people and places; and in 

our experience, even in communities enduring socioeconomic 

disadvantage. 

Just as ‘social capital’ has become a rather over-used 

term, so ‘resilience’ has become a shallow watchword for the 

sustainable self and community in times of adversity.  A Canadian 

handbook providing an excellent overview of the complexity of 

evaluating resilience in children states that ‘resilience has come 

to mean the individual capacities, behaviours, and protective 

processes associated with health outcomes despite exposure to a 

significant number of risks’ (Ungar 2005), but it later cites Glantz 

and Sloboda’s (2009) observations on resilience, concluding 

that ‘there is great diversity in the use of the concept; it is used 

variously as a quality, a trait, a process or an outcome’ (Ungar 

2005, p. 110). Ungar argues that ‘resilience’ is a concept that is 

difficult to generalise because an understanding of the specific 

social and cultural context is crucial and it requires mixed 

methods of research that account for the multiplicity of competing 

understandings of health, inevitably requiring interpretation and 

the use of metaphor. The core argument is that it is more than an 

individual trait because ‘resilience occurs when the personal meets 

the political, when the resources we need for health are available 

so we can realize our potential. We need a communitization 

of health, understanding health as a communal experience. 

Resilience is simultaneously a quality of the individual and the 

individual’s environment’ (Ungar 2005, p. xxiv). Ungar also notes 

that both psychological and political influences are needed to 

effect change in community health, and this has been particularly 

neglected in professional health practice with children – at least 

until recently in the UK. 

ADDRESSING CHILDREN’S WELLBEING THROUGH ARTS IN 
HEALTH
The Labour government’s Every Child Matters strategy, introduced 

in 2000, identified five national outcomes that all professionals 

working with children and young people needed to be aiming for: 

these are being healthy, staying safe, enjoying and achieving, 

making a positive contribution, and socioeconomic wellbeing (DfES 

2005). The strategy provided a context in which to conduct joint 

conversations, joint planning and joint working by statutory and 

voluntary agencies, with clear processes to achieve those outcomes 

for children and young people; but crucially children and young 

people had to be involved in learning to take responsibility for 

achieving those outcomes for themselves. The National Children’s 

Bureau came to see those five outcomes as integrated rather than 

separate (Worthy 2005), and identified the characteristics of good 

practice as residing particularly in projects that fostered creativity 



57 | Gateways | White & Robson

and emotional and social development. Such projects can 

ameliorate the process of transition, not only as it occurs in the 

school system but also possibly when a child undergoes difficult 

change and loss in their personal life. 

What may now affect change in both child and community 

health practice in the UK is The Marmot Review Fair Society, 

Healthy Lives (2010), which has attracted interest across the 

political spectrum, and is endorsed at the outset of the Public 

Health White Paper, Healthy Lives, Healthy People (Department of 

Health 2010). The Marmot Review sets out six policy objectives 

to reduce health inequalities, including ‘Enable all children, 

young people and adults to maximise their capabilities and have 

control over their lives’, with a priority to ‘ensure that schools, 

families and communities work in partnership to reduce the 

gradient in health, well-being and resilience’ and ‘create and 

develop healthy and sustainable places and communities’. The 

review spells out that differences in health status come down to 

economic inequalities. On the social determinants of health it 

concludes ‘All these influences are affected by the socio-political 

and cultural and social context in which they sit’ (Marmot 2010, p. 

10). It encourages extending the role of schools into communities 

and developing the education workforce to address social and 

emotional wellbeing in school, family and community life. The 

review notes that family life has more influence on a child’s 

educational development than school itself and concludes ‘The 

physical and social characteristics of communities, and the degree 

to which they enable and promote healthy behaviours, all make 

a contribution to social inequalities in health’. It calls for support 

for communities to find their own whole system solutions so that 

top–down approaches are reduced and ‘avoid drift into small-scale 

projects focused on individual behaviours and lifestyle’ (Marmot 

2010, p. 18). 

The Marmot Review stresses how working in partnership 

can scale up interventions. In recent years our schools-based arts 

in health projects (and at last count we are variously working 

with 24 schools) have been brought together in an annual review 

meeting at The Wolfson Institute in order to learn from each 

other’s practice and to set a framework for exchange visits and the 

scaling up of activity into a common program. The university had 

a facilitating role in enabling focused conversation to take place 

between academics, schoolteachers and participants, enabling us 

to refine together the proposals that we intend to present to major 

research charities and research councils in the coming year. We 

have also attempted to nurture a network for engagement in a 

longitudinal study. 

One of the most influential of our community arts in 

health and education projects is now in its eighth year: ‘Roots and 

Wings’, based in a primary school in Chickenley in West Yorkshire. 

Chickenley is a socioeconomically deprived ‘sink estate’ on the 

outskirts of Dewsbury. Its primary school has had a troubled 

recent history, with a record of low academic achievement and 



58 | Gateways | White & Robson

uncommitted teaching staff – some children had experienced as 

many as 14 different class teachers in five years. As a result, in 

2001 it was taken into ‘special measures’ on the recommendation 

of the inspectorate. A newly installed head teacher saw the 

potential in having artists in residence at the school to help address 

its difficulties, to be funded initially through the Children’s Fund. 

The project’s artists, led by Robson, have worked year-round with 

pupils, their families, school staff and the wider community to 

foster social and emotional development and encourage cultural 

change through new traditions that mark significant moments in 

the life of the community.

At the core of Roots and Wings is the art room, a space 

run by the children during breaks and lunchtimes with artist 

support. Children choose to make things of emotional content in 

these sessions. Encouragement to reflect on feelings has led to the 

children creating greetings cards, initially for friends and family 

but now also for sale in craft outlets in the town, with the proceeds 

providing charitable donations that the children determine. 

Sometimes there may be as many as 40 children in the art room, 

but order emerges in this bedlam as children assist each other 

in realising their art from concept to appraisal. It is not just an 

activity room; it is a space to foster empathy, and to model and 

analyse relationships in a child-friendly way. The art room also 

provides a congenial space that has influenced the design of other 

areas in the school. 

 Within three years, the Roots and Wings program had 

significantly impacted on Chickenley Primary’s performance at all 

levels. An Ofsted inspection report (Kirklees LEA 2006) stated:

One child wrote about her marvellous work of art, ‘I think I am a 

painter now. I could work in a fast food restaurant, but being a 

painter is better’. Pupils are cherished as individuals. Education for 

personal, social, health and citizenship is well organised to promote 

healthy and safe lifestyles. The initiative entitled ‘Roots and Wings’ is 

an outstanding element which has raised the school’s profile locally. 

Pupils’ artistic skills, writing and personal development, for example, 

are enhanced by its many superb activities. Pupils who are talented in 

sports or the arts thrive on a curriculum which offers many worthwhile 

opportunities in these areas. This is reflected in their trusting attitudes 

and confident bearing. 

And one inspector wrote to the children to say:

We loved talking to you about the way that your school has improved 

in the last few years. The ‘Roots and Wings’ project is marvellous. We 

particularly liked the art room and all that goes on in there.

A number of events take place each year that are now 

accepted and welcomed elements of Chickenley culture. There are 

two annual carnivalesque parades that celebrate transition. One 

is held when the youngest children move up to ‘big school’ and 

the other with the eldest, as they prepare to begin life at the high 

school. Every March, children and their parents transform their 



59 | Gateways | White & Robson

schoolgrounds into a candle-lit representation of their estate for an 

event known as ‘Lantern Land’. Other activities include projects 

to raise aspirations, encourage effective thinking and increase 

self esteem – and how to apply these qualities and skills to other 

areas of life. Every aspect of the project involves reflective practice, 

whether between the professional practitioners or the pupils. 

This seedbed of reflection is a nurturing environment for the 

professionals involved in Roots and Wings. Their practice places 

at the heart of everything they do a belief that curiosity is the fuel 

of development. Modelling congruent behaviour is constant and is 

crucial to the project’s success. While some professional talk will be 

of attainment, resilience, attendance and expectations, the quality 

of such projects as these is in the relationships they foster, and in 

the creation of a fund of memories, both individual and collective, 

that is helping to redefine perceptions of the community. 

Given this reflective environment, developed over years, it 

came as something of a deflating disappointment to realise that 

all was not well. A new senior management team had brought 

changes to the school, as is and should be expected. There were 

glitches with their understanding of the project and what it brought 

to the working environment of the school. Other staff changes 

inevitably added to the misunderstanding as they were not 

inducted as to Roots and Wings’ role much beyond that it produced 

fantastic art work. The overall relationship between project staff 

and school staff was amiable, yet somewhat diminished. Without 

attention, relationships can and did falter. Here was another aspect 

of the problem we had faced at Wrekenton, but this challenge felt 

enormous. Wrekenton was an annual event. This was longitudinal 

work of a rich and detailed nature and so a lot more was at stake. 

Project staff felt the problem to be an ethical one since, 

fundamentally, it was impossible for the work to develop without 

a mutually understood communal will. The way forward was to 

talk to senior management and explain that the project would 

not seek further funding and why. It required a frank, honest yet 

sensitive approach. This was a no-blame situation but everyone’s 

responsibility. The news of the developments at Wrekenton helped 

fuel some doubts in us. Were we, the professionals, making 

decisions at the expense of participants and did we have the right 

to so do?

It is fair to say that the revelation came as a shock to 

the senior management. They had no idea that the problem 

existed and found it impossible to imagine the school without 

Roots and Wings. The new head teacher declared that the 

nurturing environment provided by the project was crucial for 

the children and their ability to learn. What the project team had 

thought to be a full stop was a semi-colon, a necessary pause. 

The announcement of a possible closure quickly turned into a 

conversation that opened up channels of communication. Both 

sides were able to admit responsibility without rancour and to 

move on to a new phase of development; the project continues as a 



60 | Gateways | White & Robson

result and to everyone’s credit. That the project enjoys such a rich, 

reflective environment meant that the situation was called out in 

time, before it sank to a point of no return. This was not a repeat of 

the Wrekenton situation; it was progress and indeed sustainability. 

OFFSHOOTS OF THE PROJECTS
Given the longitudinal nature of the work, there is already 

an accumulated wealth of data from our projects clearly 

demonstrating how arts-led approaches can contribute to mental 

health and wellbeing work in schools (Raw 2006). Arts practice is 

now helping to shape educational practice on different levels, and 

the links between professionals and academics and participants 

are now many and varied, as the following examples suggest:

 —In the Centre for Medical Humanities (CMH) we are co-authoring 

book chapters and articles with our research fellows and PhD 

students, based on our fused interests, thereby creating other layers 

of interdisciplinary working and ways of sustaining interest in and 

debate about the CMH’s work. 

 —The original evaluator of Roots and Wings has become a PhD 

student at CMH, pursuing interests in the empathic nature and 

skills-base of arts and health practice. Her field research will be 

based on several of our projects.

 —As part of an aspirations project, an Associate Dean from 

Huddersfield University was invited to Chickenley to be interviewed 

by the children about her job. In response, she invited the children 

to the university where they visited the ‘research gym’ and met 

with professionals, academics and students. 

 —A Year 6 teacher at Chickenley now works regularly alongside 

Robson in providing training in ‘The Nurturing Curriculum’ to 

teachers in the Kirklees district through the borough’s Targeted 

Mental Health in Schools (TaMHS) initiative. 

 —The Open University (2009) chose Roots and Wings for a filmed 

case study to accompany its interdisciplinary course in Critical 

Practice with Children and Young People, a module masters-

level course that provides a deeper understanding of the ideas 

that influence current practice, analyses recent changes in the 

organisation of services and explores what it means to be a critical, 

reflective practitioner (Robb & Thomson 2010).

 —Academics from the Anthropology and Geography departments 

at Durham have visited Roots and Wings on several occasions 

and show an ongoing interest in the possibility of future research 

collaborations with practitioners and participants.

These sustained relationships make for a complex network: 

practitioners, participants and academics meet in safe and 

comfortable spaces, allowing for mutual understanding that can 

help to originate participatory and guided research with mentoring 

from various departments within Durham University. 

The projects themselves also generate more research-guided 

practice. Loca is Kirklees Council’s arts and regeneration agency. 

Inspired by Roots and Wings’ successes, the agency was keen to 



61 | Gateways | White & Robson

extend to other schools some of the working practices that were 

proving so successful in Chickenley. Loca successfully bid for 

funding to develop ‘Inside Me’, a program which for its first three 

years involved artists working in a cohort of six primary schools 

to deliver a series of 18 short projects with a particular focus on 

emotional literacy and emotional health. On the strength of the 

impacts and strong evidence base generated (Loca 2009), Kirklees 

Primary Care Trust offered funding to extend and deepen the 

work, enabling a program which saw five artists placed in four 

primary schools and one secondary school for two years on an 

‘in residence’ basis. This in turn led to the Primary Care Trust 

commissioning Loca to be a delivery partner in the new Kirklees 

TaMHS program. Loca’s creative input to this 10-month program 

involves some of the most experienced artists from Inside Me and 

Roots and Wings working alongside other specialists (including a 

primary mental health worker, educational psychologists, Social 

and Emotional Aspects of Learning specialists) to find innovative 

and creative interdisciplinary ways of delivering interventions and 

training with children and staff in 15 participating schools (only 

one of which has previously been involved with Inside Me). 

In respect of the Inside Me work in the two years prior to 

TaMHS, Kirklees Primary Care Trust was not interested in yet 

more of the kind of evaluation (focused on proving the work’s 

emotional health impacts with children) which had persuaded it 

to invest in the work in the first place. So Loca invited academics 

from the Centre for Medical Humanities to a study day to examine 

the data and generate ideas for differently focused discussion, 

reading and writing. The resultant papers and articles are a way of 

sustaining interest in and thinking about the work and retaining 

a relationship with academics; an alternative to an evaluation 

report that might never have seen the light of day.

CONCLUSIONS
Sustaining a long-term relationship with projects like those 

we have described also allows both the quantity and quality 

of documentation and dissemination to be improved. Such 

work lends itself readily to interdisciplinary analysis as well as 

generating a richly detailed evocation of the process of the work, 

so that participants’ tales become vital testimony. The emergent 

narrative in a community about a continuing seasonal celebration 

assists our understanding of the resonance and aesthetic agency 

of arts in health that we referred to earlier. For example, when 

we asked a group of women volunteers whether the lanterns 

had any significance for them after the event, they replied in 

unison ‘They’re our memories’. This home-grown testimony helps 

to build the persuasive advocacy for an arts in health project 

to be sustained through difficult times. It is important to look 

through and beyond the evidence because as the World Health 

Organization (2008 p. 33) has observed, ‘evidence is only one part 

of what swings policy decisions – political will and institutional 



62 | Gateways | White & Robson

capacity are important too. But more than being simply academic 

exercises, research is needed to generate new understanding in 

practical, accessible ways, recognising and utilising a range of 

types of evidence, and recognising the added value of globally 

expanded Knowledge Networks and communities.’ 

 Despite the present economic climate of austerity, there 

is still fertile ground on which arts in community health and 

university research can engage. In a pressured voluntary sector, 

schools with a commitment to supporting community development 

may become key partners and locations from which to explore 

a viable ‘Big Society’. Creating ‘communitas’ in neighbourhoods 

is going to require far more than recreational volunteering if 

the coalition government’s ‘Big Society’ idea is to redress the 

effects on local services of what author and libraries campaigner 

Philip Pullman (2011) has tellingly described as ‘market 

fundamentalism’. Long-term partnerships between restructured 

local health services, academy-style schools with a social agenda 

and whatever cultural services have been spared the axe could 

be crucial – and university involvement could help motivate such 

partnerships to common ends in practice and research. Methods of 

knowledge exchange and transfer will need to become more about 

entrepreneurial ingenuity and low resource requirement, and about 

releasing staff for volunteering than applying full economic costing 

for research. 

As England’s public health function is now being transferred 

to local authorities, strategies to deliver on community health 

must remain sensitive to local culture and circumstances or the 

inherent advantage of having local authorities as a commissioning 

nexus for services relevant to local population needs may be lost. 

As evidenced in Happy Hearts and other projects described in this 

article, effective health promotion is about more than addressing 

topical health issues and priorities, it is also about issues of 

identity, meaning and place – and these are essential factors in 

the development of arts in community health, in expressing the 

ethos of healthy schools, and in maintaining what Bertholt Brecht 

described as ’the greatest art of all; the art of living together’ 

(Willett 1964, p. 276).

ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS
The authors would like to gratefully acknowledge the cooperation 

and support over many years of the residents of the Wrekenton 

and Springwell estates in Gateshead, Loca cultural development 

agency, and the staff and pupils of Chickenley Primary School in 

Dewsbury.

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