The OAE – Acland Burghley school partnership

Last month, I attended a workshop in Camden given by the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment. In September 2020, the OAE stole headlines by taking up residency at a mixed comprehensive school, Acland Burghley, using the school's hexagonal assembly hall for rehearsals and a few rooms as office space. It was the first and (then) only UK arts organisation based at a school.

ABS, as it's known, acquired specialist status as an arts college in 2000. It's always had strong links to Camden Music Service, but now hosts one of the UK's leading orchestras. The experience, by all accounts, has been beneficial, even transformative for the two parties.

The ensemble and taster session

The workshop is designed for the whole of Year 7 to attend during their first weeks at secondary school. Featuring members of the OAE led by composer James Redwood, it introduces students to Baroque repertoire, instruments and musical forms and elements. The programme includes parts of Handel's Water Music, Purcell's King Arthur and Fairy Queen, a rondo by Chevalier de St-Georges as well as music by Redwood that links to the curriculum and brings an contemporary edge.

As part of the ensemble, alongside period strings, brass, wind and a harpsichord, there's a small group of Year 11 students on guitars, percussion and keyboard. Playing their own material (incorporated by Redwood), the students are part of two GCSE Music groups at the school that have benefitted from contact with the OAE, whether through mentoring, or composition and listening activities. The pass rate for GCSE Music at the school has risen from 24% to 77% over the last few years.

Eventually, all perform together, joined by the audience providing body percussion, answers to Redwood's questions, and a sea shanty (with actions), all skilfully interwoven by the conductor. The whole hall is involved. The Baroque repertoire demonstrates the rondo, chaconne, and texture in the form of a trio (with spatially-separated players).

I'm aware this is starting to sound like Britten's Guide to the Orchestra, but there is nothing ‘documentary’ or passive here, nor presumed in terms of experience. We're all musically invested, and there are few or no barriers.

After the event, the Year 7s take home leaflets for expressing an interest, if they wish, in learning an instrument. The leaflets make their way to Camden Music Service, the school's provider of weekly tuition. For developing players, there's an OAE programme, Nurturing Talent, providing mentors from the OAE.

‘Normalising’ the orchestra and high art

Sitting on a hard plastic chair listening to historically-informed interpretations (at Baroque pitch) in a school hall from the 1960s, the workshop feels a tad incongruous. But that's the point. I'm not accustomed to hearing specialist performance groups in these surroundings, though I'm not sure why. The OAE wears its learning lightly, and expressions like ‘harmonic series' or ‘natural horns’ trip off the tongue without much explanation. Redwood, an educator as well as a composer, explains later how he prefers ‘sound before symbol – I want people to get excited enough that they want to know what the language means’.

The point about not being a members’ club is also made by Anna Rimington, ABS's director of learning for KS5 and the supervising teacher for the workshop. She plays a central role in the partnership and ‘can't stand the whole cultural capital thing’, she explains. ‘It's better to barrel in, roll around in the language and see what happens. It's the story that's going to carry you along’, while comparing Handel to Dickens, which she teaches.

This ‘normalisation’, as she puts it – having children feel that attending a concert isn't out of the ordinary – becomes more apparent in the playground. The ‘ambient presence’ of the orchestra rehearsing is unavoidable, and ABS students are now used to referring to ‘our orchestra’.

OAE's rationale

After the event, I speak with the orchestra's CEO, Crispin Woodhead, to learn how the partnership came about. The lease at ‘our wonderful concert hall’ (Kings Place) was coming to an end, he explains, and they were looking for a new home. ‘By great fortune, we ended up looking at Acland Burghley, who were looking more for a hire deal’ – education, like the arts, was facing an enormous squeeze on funding and the school's space could be better used. ‘We visited, met the kids, realised there was something in this, and I went to the headteacher to see if we could move in. It wasn't what we were expecting.’

Inner-city kids rubbing shoulders with a Baroque orchestra was bound to make the headlines, but there were compelling ‘fundamentals’, Woodhead explains: ‘We got better offices than we've ever had in the centre of London, and for far less than we were ever likely to pay. Our use of the space hasn't displaced anyone at the school or affected its capacity. And there was a huge chunk of consolidated income every year for the school during a funding crisis. It hasn't cost the taxpayer a penny more, and people don't have to worry that we're spending money on water coolers or melamine. All the money spent is core, spent on rent, with every penny going straight through the door into the classroom.’

Arts landscape

My question was why hadn't this been tried before? The squeeze was never this severe, Woodhead says, and he's aware of the demands placed on successive governments by social and health crises and geo-political events. But he's also wise to the big changes in arts funding.

‘Before this happened, I think the Arts Council would have seen us as a really good orchestra but increasingly out of step with what their mission was and their funding capacity. So, I would not have blamed them, and would not have been surprised, if we carried on putting our money into offices somewhere, hoping for the best, and they made further cuts, perhaps completely. The honest truth is there isn't enough money.’

Our conversation turns to the recent threat of cuts to the BBC. Woodhead is phlegmatic: ‘It was wonderful to hear the great and the good come out and support the BBC orchestras and BBC Singers. But who were they talking to? To me, an organ scholar from Oxford?’. We both acknowledged that they probably weren't talking to the ‘VIPs in this conversation’ – those who don't know these organisations exist or why they should be saved. It was ‘an appalling missed opportunity’, he adds. ‘If the BBC had said we're going to create something special for the benefit of every child in the country, and we're going to live up to this (because we have the elbow room), that would have been truly inspirational. But they didn’t.’

A new way of thinking

As an example of his and OAE's lateral thinking, Woodhead refers me to an innovative tech firm called Deep Green and a case-study involving a public swimming pool in Devon. Later, I look this up. The pool can't afford the energy to heat the water. Deep Green, which specialises in digital data centres, acquires a room at the pool and in exchange provides 60% of the energy the pool needs for one year – from its ‘digital boiler’. Woodhead sees this as a metaphor and way forward.

Cross-curricular vision

Over lunch, to hear the school's take on things, I talk with Anna Rimington, who seems central to the mutual understanding that has developed. What excites her most about the partnership is the cross-curricular vision. ‘We thought it would be just about the music, but by having an orchestra in school, we've imported much more. It's managed to infiltrate almost every aspect of our school, and we've engaged skills in all sorts of fields.’

The most notable example is the Dreamchasing Young Producers programme (an initiative that Woodhead admits ‘never occurred to us’). The programme involves students learning how to make videos, do lighting, edit digital content, design costumes, and draft contracts – in other words, it draws on the technical and operational side to running an orchestra. It's supported by outside professionals who serve as mentors to the students, along with OAE staff.

Young Producers filming Telling Tales with Telemann at St Giles' Cripplegate
Matas Juskevicius

The partnership, Woodhead later explains, ‘is giving them [the students] the sort of experience necessary to become creative industry professionals. It's a pipeline and opportunity for kids who may not want to learn an instrument’. At this point, I'm reminded of an earlier comment by OAE's chair: ‘this is more than about teaching the violin to 1200 kids’.

The Young Producers ‘absolutely love risk assessments’, according to Woodhead, and Remington, sensing a quizzical look, confirms this. Students also get work experience opportunities with OAE and run their own club nights (‘Live at the Hex’), developing skills in event management.

Next year, ABS will be entering students for the new T Level in digital media and production. Rimington also draws my attention to ‘amazing dancers from the school, a company of boys’, who featured at a community opera led by OAE (The Moon Hares; for a picture, see page 3).

Wider participation

An additional benefit, according to Rimington, is how OAE ‘gets who we are as a school, what our cohort is. We're a mainstream school with a really high number of students with additional educational needs’. The school is among the top 10% of schools based on numbers having Education and Health Care Plan statements.

‘What this means is that you need people to work with, groups who understand and have experience of working with students with these needs.’ Cherry Forbes, director of OAE education, and her team fit this brief. They bring huge expertise from working on various projects with students with additional needs. ‘The beauty of it is that we're picking up a level of expertise that already exists’, says Rimington.

Forbes leads OAE's Musical Connections, the three-year arts-based learning projects bringing mainstream students and students with additional needs together. ABS is one of four schools on the project using music to break down barriers and build skills and friendships. The involvement doesn't end there, though. ‘Cherry's team is able to say: okay, we're going to do a project in your autism base, where lots of institutions or organisations simply haven't the skills.’ Rimington provides an example of one student with challenging behaviour who has flourished under Musical Connections; having somewhere to go to make music, somewhere to decompress, has meant keeping him at the school.

Rimington also brings my attention to a new ABS Concert Club, in which families and staff will get heavily discounted tickets to upcoming OAE concerts.

Final thought

In May this year, MT published an article by Jonathan Vaughan, principal of the Guildhall School of Music & Drama. He shares many of the views I heard at OAE, not least ‘how the calvary isn't coming over the hill’ any time soon for music education. The UK, let's face it, has never funded the arts the way continental Europe has; and music education has been deprioritised under successive UK governments. There's never been a better time to team up or think radically. Woodhead and the OAE have an ambition to provide a model for the rest of the country, and I hope they succeed.

Before I leave, the CEO draws a bigger picture. ‘There's the homes-under-the-hammer thing where people think you move to a school and suddenly everyone plays the violin and they're all saved. Are you kidding? There's County Lines. What papers do you read? It's north London; it's just not like that.

‘So, rather than saying we're here, we're saving the world, we wanted to do the work and prove the case. Live it. Show people that, after three years, there's not a single safeguarding issue, we're all engaged as colleagues and we don't get in their [the school's] way.’

Equally, speaking on behalf of OAE, ‘We haven't gone off the ball as an orchestra. We've done our best work last season with András Schiff. We're at the top of our game.’

This sounds like having cake and eating it.