Supporting creative & cultural partnerships – Arts Award’s commitment to Local Cultural Education Partnerships

At Arts Award we love working in partnership. We are always seeing great examples of schools and arts organisations working together to create great projects, and advisers often tell us that one of the things they love about Arts Award is that it can help to make this sort of partnership working just that bit easier.

Some of the best partnerships in England are the Local Cultural Education Partnerships (LCEPs). LCEPs began as a pilot in 2014, in response to the Cultural Education Challenge, and since then over 90 LCEPs have emerged. As each part of the country has different needs, each LCEP is unique in their formation and priorities, although all LCEPs have some common themes and aims such as:

• Embedding Arts and Culture into wider community agendas
• Capacity building in schools
• Developing strategic partnerships
• Ensuring diversity and inclusion has been considered

Arts Award can help with many of these aims – and our dedicated webpage for LCEPs explores this in more detail. We are keen that we are a supportive and encouraging partner for LCEPs, helping them to broker links and relationships between schools and arts organisations, as well as embedding arts progression, recognition and enjoyment for children and young people into all aspects of their work.

Our LCEP programme, created in partnership and through conversations with LCEPs nationwide, aims to not only provide dedicated support to individual LCEPs, but also a forum for LCEPs to come together, debate topics of interest and to network with other LCEP members. Through a free programme of online networking events, we’ll be sparking conversations about Arts Award leadership as part of the LCEP structure and how Arts Award can support an LCEP’s Story of Change. We will explore the best ways to advocate for Arts Award when working in partnership with schools, and how to approach a place-based delivery model with members of LCEPs across towns and cities.

Talking with you was hugely useful - hearing what other CEPs are doing with Arts Awards and about particular focuses and studies that Trinity had done. We are pursuing the introduction of Arts Award into PGCE courses as a result, and have developed our Arts Award strategy going forward.

Sheffield CEP

We hope that this is an exciting and interesting opportunity for any member of any LCEP – and we hope to see you at our next networking event! Upcoming sessions you can book onto can be found here.

And if you would like to explore having a dedicated session for your LCEP, you can request this (for free!) here: