Arts and Creativity
What do we mean by Creative Health?
Creative Health is an approach to address Health and Wellbeing through engagement in creative activities such as dance, drama, visual art, film making, music or puppetry to name a few! There are many benefits of the approach in terms of our children and young people here in the North East and North Cumbria.
The Ofsted framework for personal development states:
[Paragraph 291]. The curriculum provided by schools should extend beyond the academic, technical or vocational. Schools support pupils to develop in many diverse aspects of life. The personal development judgement is used by inspectors to evaluate the school’s intent to provide for the personal development of all pupils, and the quality with which the school implements this work.
The Child Health and Wellbeing Network strive to support creative health projects.
Who are the Child Health and Wellbeing Network?
The Child Health and Wellbeing Network's (CHWN) brings together people from all sectors across the region, such as health, education, local authorities and the voluntary and community sector, to work with children, young people and their families to make sure our work is more able to support them and have a positive impact.
We are proud to be part of a small but growing network in the North East and North Cumbria that plans to make a real difference to children’s services.
Join the Child Health and Wellbeing Network
The CHWN's Creative Health work so far:
- Delivered specific NHS England pieces of work for children Partnership bids to access new funding
- Developed advisor roles to influence our work from the broad system across system membership - now with over 2000 members signed up
- Held events to share good practice
- Produced a quarterly newsletter, weekly update and social media presence
One of the Child Health and Wellbeing Network's key cross cutting themes is art and creativity, this has led to them creating an awards programme in honour of their former Arts and Creativity Executive Lead, for primary schools; The Chris Drinkwater Creative Health in Primary Schools Awards.
The network has always promoted work in the creative arts one example is The South Tees Arts Project (STAR), an innovative school-based project to access to the arts for people living in areas of South Tees with levels of deprivation and improve health and wellbeing S.T.A.R. - resources for sharing - TIN Arts
Arts and Creativity Advisor
Martin Wilson MBE is the Child Health and Wellbeing Network's Arts and Creativity Advisor
Martin has worked in arts and culture in North East England for over 25 years. He is the Director of TIN Arts in Durham. TIN Arts delivers activities across the North East and their vision is to create a world in which everybody has access to the arts. They hope to achieve this by removing barriers and increasing access to high-quality dance and performing arts. Martin started working with the Child Health and Wellbeing Network in 2019 as part of the STAR project. He is now in his second year as Arts & Creativity Advisor to the network. Connect with Martin
National Centre for Creative Health and the All-Party Parliamentary Group on Arts, Health and Wellbeing launched Creative Health Review
The Creative Health Review will highlight the potential for creative health to help tackle pressing issues in health and social care and more widely, including health inequalities and the additional challenges we face as we recover from Covid-19.
As well as producing recommendations to the Government, we hope the findings of the review will be useful and inspiring for regional and local leaders, and that the evidence and examples presented will be interesting to those involved in creative health and wider audiences.
The Child Health and Wellbeing Network's NENC STAR initiative is listed on page 72 of the document and there are some important key messages and detail within the report that will be of interest to those working with Children and Young People.