Arts: Contribution to Education, Health and Emotional Well-being

Lord Howarth of Newport Excerpts

Thursday 25th July 2013 Lords Chamber

[Lord Howarth of Newport]

My Lords, the greatest contribution that the arts can make to education is to offer young people the opportunity of beauty, and an understanding of it, and to take them into new imaginative realms. Many people tell us that the poems they were required to learn by heart when they were young have been an abiding treasure for them in their lives. I was glad that the Secretary of State, Michael Gove, responded positively to the proposal by the Poetry Archive, of which I was a trustee, that there should be a competition for schoolchildren across the country to recite poems aloud. The national finals at the National Portrait Gallery were a great occasion.

The value of that kind of experience is not measurable; it is over and beyond the utilitarian calculus of Mr M’Choakumchild—or, all too often, of the Department for Education and of the DCMS, with the Treasury lurking behind them. It has been said that poets are unacknowledged legislators; in that respect they are rather like noble Lords. Poetry, drama and the novel offer insight into human nature, and a moral education—the best kind of moral education, because it is not dogmatic. Matthew Arnold was professor of poetry at the University of Oxford, and also Chief Inspector of Schools—what a good appointment that was by the Government of the day. He said that the study of literature helps one to answer the great question: “How to live?” The study of literature teaches people—to use a term that has lost too many of its positive connotations—discrimination. It teaches them to make moral distinctions, to recognise integrity and quality.

The study of poetry is the study of language at its most expressive. Young readers of poetry learn to see cliché, jargon, linguistic slackness and the meretricious and manipulative use of language for what they are, whether it be the language of journalism, of advertising or of bureaucracy—or, indeed, of politics. They learn to value linguistic precision, authenticity and power. It is a survival kit for them, and it is certainly a preparation for their participation in democracy.

I do not think that I would make such a claim for the other arts. The Nazi guards at Theresienstadt and Auschwitz loved Mozart. Dr Goebbels accumulated a magnificent collection of art at the point of his gun. Architects and autocrats have been locked in mutual admiration for centuries.

Performances of dance, plays and music provide young people with an experience of teamwork and discipline. There is evidence that these experiences release a kind of primal energy and creativity across the whole life of the school. We have seen the power of El Sistema for young people in this country—in Glasgow and in Norwich, where I live.

The study and the practice of the visual arts are an education for the imagination. The education of the imagination has been too much neglected in the British educational tradition, which has put most of its emphasis on logic and analysis. It also teaches the history of our civilisation and of our own heritage and that of others.

So where should one stop? Professor Marcus du Sautoy tells us:

“Maths is a creative art, not a useful science”.

Cookery is an art according to Ferran Adrià, the creator of elBulli. We must leave it to the gauleiters of the national curriculum to determine these matters. I would simply say that it is an error to marginalise the arts and the school curriculum, as it is to underfund the humanities in higher education.

I shall speak about the contribution of the arts to health and emotional well-being. The crisis at the Mid-Staffordshire hospital and other hospitals, and that at the Care Quality Commission, have been crises of organisational cultures that have been drained of humanity—dehumanised as the noble Lord, Lord Rea, said—organisations in which systems have become more important than people and in which care has become too little imbued with kindness. The managerial reforms that the Government have proposed will be necessary but not sufficient. The remedies for this crisis will not ultimately be bureaucratic or mechanistic; they will lie in improving the ethos and morale of these services, in nurturing the empathy of the people who work in them and in improving the quality of relationships within them.

Here, the values and the practice of the arts in health movement have a profoundly important contribution to make. Across the country, practitioners of arts in health are ready to offer their contribution to health and social care for the benefit of patients, the frail and elderly, staff, and carers at home. We saw recently in London Creativity and Wellbeing Week the array of such practices and services. The Royal Society for Public Health in its recent publication, Beyond the Millennium, has documented the range of organisations and excellence in this field. The National Alliance for Arts, Health and Wellbeing was formed last year to represent practitioners across the English regions. It is available to engage with policymakers and decision-takers. Its work is international. At its recent conference in Bristol, people from 22 countries came together to share their experiences and ideas. The chairman of the national alliance, Dr Clive Parkinson from Manchester Metropolitan University, has been engaging with Governments across Europe in this field.

Museums and galleries in recent years have become more than repositories of cultural artefacts; they have become places for learning, for social engagement and for well-being. So, too, theatres, orchestras and heritage sites have been developing their arts, health and well-being agendas.

This resource is still under-recognised and underutilised in official policy. Policy has seen fits, starts and setbacks. The Department of Health and the Arts Council produced A Prospectus for Arts and Health in 2007. Then there was a faltering. But then, Alan Johnson, as Secretary of State, made a very important speech at the Wallace Collection in 2008 in which, using the authority of his office, he said that the arts should be in the mainstream of health and social care provision. Then there was again a phase of retrenchment and defensiveness. It would be timely now for the Secretary of State, with his responsibility for health and social services, to renew the leadership that his predecessor displayed.

A growing body of research and evaluation has been developing since the groundbreaking work of Rosalia Staricoff demonstrated that arts interventions in healthcare produce benefits in terms of shorter hospital stays, reduced pain, improved blood pressure in patients and less need for drugs, as well as finding that staff turnover was less where this was happening. Eminent academics Professor Mike White of the Centre for Medical Humanities at Durham, Professor Jennifer Secker at Anglia Ruskin University and Professor Paul Camic at Canterbury Christchurch University are leaders in this field. I will give just two instances of important research. In 2009, the Arts and Humanities Research Council commissioned Dr Helen Chatterjee at University College London to examine the impact on the wellbeing of hospital patients of handling and discussing museum objects. The findings were statistically significant and positive. Professor Stephen Clift of Canterbury Christchurch University was funded by the National Institute of Health Research to conduct a randomised controlled test of the benefits of choral singing for older adults. It was, again, found that there were statistically significant beneficial effects on their health and well-being. That research has been published in the British Journal of Psychiatry. There is, therefore, robust research which demonstrates the clear and substantial value of the arts and design in health and which also shows that it is economic and cost effective.

Other foundations have been persuaded to support this work. We should thank Llankelly Chase, Wellcome, Nuffield, Clore, Hamlyn, Rayne and Baring, who are working with the Arts Council of England on the arts and older people in care project.

Senior members of the medical profession are increasingly recognising the importance of this. Professor Sir David Weatherall, the former Regius Professor of Medicine at Oxford, who was quoted by the noble Lord, Lord Rea, has given his view that orthodox, specialised medicine, based on clinical science, is insufficient. What he calls “patch-up medicine” is “reductionist” and “dehumanised”. He also observes that it is prohibitively expensive and fails to address the causes of malaise. He says we should do more to prevent people falling ill through promoting lives of well-being.

New policy dispositions open up new possibilities. Clinical commissioning groups are at liberty to commission arts organisations if they wish. The Health and Social Care Act created Public Health England which is entrusting to local government significant funding and responsibilities to link their services for young people and old people with the services of the NHS, to find the roots of ill-health in their localities, and to develop their work through joint strategic needs assessments and health and well-being strategies. There is a new recognition in Government of the importance of well-being: the recognition that GDP is not a sufficient measure of national progress and that “getting and spending”, to quote Wordsworth again, is insufficient. The Office for National Statistics index of national well-being includes a category under arts and culture.

There are many ways in which we can do better to provide true care and to build social capital and individual and social resilience. However, the arts have a special contribution to make beyond the benefits of social engagement and human kindness. It may be that the therapeutic benefits of rhythm, colour and stimulus to the imagination are what count. Perhaps it is access to beauty, insight and the renewal of the life of the spirit. More research, including magnetic resonance imaging, will cast more light on this. However, the health and social care establishments, as they become more integrated, would be foolish not to grasp the opportunity of what the arts can contribute to health and well-being.