"Life Beats Down and Crushes the Soul and Art Reminds You that You Have One"

There are moments in my working life when I feel truly blessed at the invitations that find their way to my inbox. There are times also, when I wonder what path I have set out on that is so challenging, lonely at times, devoid of recognition or appreciation. But that is another matter.

An invitation from Molly, Access Manager at the Royal Academy, London, to deliver the opening keynote presentation for their second annual "Why and How Conference – Engaging children with SEN in creating art and cultural experiences," has been one of the greatest delights of my professional life. I have loved this event, truly, madly, deeply.

This conference invitation held challenges in several weeks of deliberations: what shall I say, what form will my presentation take, am I using visuals, can I really expect an audience to listen to me, alone, for the duration of 50 minutes delivery time?

I will not regurgitate the whole lecture here, but will give a glimpse of its themes in the hopes it may inspire you to look with interest on my subject.

Daniel Day-Lewis brought vividly to life the struggles of Christy Brown, (1932 - 1981) the Irish writer and artist born with cerebral palsy, in the film My Left Foot. Brown endured multiple disadvantage in the poverty of his home life, the paucity of opportunity for children born with ‘mental defect’ and with muscular control limited to his left foot. Yet Brown became a chronicler of the power of the human spirit in adversity, through his writing, paintings and his memoir.

We may no longer talk about ‘mental defectiveness’ and times have moved on from the bleak days of Brown’s childhood, but the vulnerability of children with SEND to be excluded from all that is on offer to children without SEND, endures. Art and self-expression liberated Brown from a lifetime of imprisonment and silent observation of the interconnected world of other people.

Yet today, 80 years after Brown’s breakthrough moment at the age of five with a piece of chalk, many children with SEND are dependent on chance and circumstance to bring them to art and creative activity. Incidental routes to accessing the arts increasingly play a vital role as time allocated to a creative curriculum in schools in England is subordinate to the demand for a robust academic education.

An educator, sensing that juncture where curiosity and opportunity meet, recommends a weekend arts activity to a child with SEND; a school leader apportions an element of pupil premium funding to enable a child from a low-income household to attend an after-school art class; a parent, alert to the offer of a family-based activity at a local gallery, is encouraged by a friend to attend.

Chance and circumstance pave the way for children with SEND to experience artistic self-expression and the joy of experimentation as systems, policy and strategy divide and weaken the resolve of many educators to give parity of status to art-based subjects within the curriculum.

Children who struggle with academic attainment can transcend the challenges of everyday life through the arts. Engagement provides a gateway to freedom, an outlet for self-expression and helps forge connections in a fragmented world. It enables children to explore, with supportive adults, difficult conversations and find new and more positive ways of defining the self.

Art provides the means by which children can begin to discover themselves, as separate beings to the identity defined by their disability, forged by their environment and reaffirmed by the words and deeds of others.

"When I discover who I am, I'll be free." —Ralph Ellison, Invisible Man, 1952.

Heather Stack, May 2018Heather is an independent SEN & Disability Consultant and founder of a social enterprise supporting the needs of children, young people & adults.