Stanley Grove Primary Academy

The Whitworth’s relationship with Stanley Grove Primary Academy is the gallery’s flagship formal engagement partnership with a local school.

The aim was reaching local communities through school based arts interventions to impact on positive family participation and engagement.

In 2015 the Whitworth identified that there was little or no engagement with local South Asian families visiting from our neighboring ward Longsight. As a key ambition of our Hyperlocal engagement strategy, we partnered with a local Primary Academy, Stanley Grove to implement a seven year study to explore how arts and culture can impact positively in the lives of pupils and their families. A key ambition of the partnership is to establish a local footprint of familiarity with the Whitworth, encouraging traditional non- visiting communities to feel welcome and develop a sense of belonging at the gallery. To date we have worked with over eighty members of teaching staff, 1000 pupils and have reached over 20000 local families at 80 workshops, community festivals and a through a major intervention in 2018, a child curated exhibition, We Are 11.

Throughout 2018, 11 children from the school took on the role as lead curators to select works from the Whitworth’s collection that connected with themes important to them: Family, friends, school, entertainment, worries and hopes for the future. Pupils worked alongside gallery and school staff at weekly workshops between March and September in that year to help imagine their story. We are 11 was the first exhibition at the Whitworth to be curated by primary school aged children. It included works that span 400 years of creativity, from the casket embroidered by eleven-year old Hannah Smith in the 1650s to Happy Days wallpaper, showing a futuristic sky filled with spaceships. Selecting works that appealed to their imagination, ideas and personal experiences of the world, the curators tell the stories of the things that matter most to an eleven-year old living in Longsight, Manchester in 2018. The themes of the exhibition were central to a schools outreach programme. Pupils from 27 primary schools from across Manchester produced over 9000 paper cube caskets, decorated with their personalised responses. Participants were invited to a family friendly event at the gallery in October where all 9000 cubes created a participatory ‘Big Draw’ installation that took over and animated the whole building. The Stanley Grove partnership is starting to radically change how we work with our local communities, using schools as a gateway to engagement. It has changed the perceptions of local families with what they expect from an art gallery and furthers the vision of the University’s ideas about social responsibility. It has helped unpick some of the pre conceptions of how schools and local families perceive the institution and helps us to maximise our commitment to developing excellent engagement opportunities for all of our local constituents aspiring to be an accessible and welcoming front door of the University.

We can’t wait to welcome back teachers, staff and the children when we re-open soon and wish to pay special tribute to Emma Martin for her dedication, enthusiasm and creative ideas to build bridges between our gallery spaces and local communities. Emma’s work was rightfully recognised when she won ‘Outstanding Contribution’ at the Manchester Culture Awards in 2019.