CCI met Cambridge Acorn Project (CAP), a family therapy charity working across our county, during lockdown. Ruth Sapsed (CCI’s Director) and Matt Edge (CEO and therapeutic practitioner) recognised a powerful sharing of values and vision for how to enrich vulnerable children’s lives. We wanted to find ways for children in school to have experiences that we knew were therapeutic in nature but were not labelled (and so potentially stigmatised) in that way.
Therapeutic not therapy
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The children we work with are very vulnerable - many don’t have a place they feel they can go in their community where they feel safe. Many spend little or no time outside. Many speak regularly about death and sadness. Yet the children who have joined our projects often say that these are their favourite two hours of the week, that they notice how happy they feel outside. This work is therapeutic, but not therapy.
Matt Edge, CEO and Therapeutic Practitioner, Cambridge Acorn Project
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These experiences can offer different, creative ways of learning – often to pupils who might struggle in a classroom setting – and bring all sorts of benefits in terms of connecting young people to their environment. These sessions can help them think about how to look after nature, which is absolutely vital for the future stewardship of our environment and our planet.
Alex Collis, Executive Councillor for Open Spaces, Cambridge City Council
We trialled a joint approach to running artscaper programmes with an artist and therapeutic practitioner with small groups of carefully-chosen children at Thongsley Fields Primary School in Huntingdon and at North Cambridge Academy during 2021. Whilst Thongsley had access to a wild area in its own grounds, NCA students walked to a unique natural space nearby called Highfields, owned and managed by Cambridge City Council for education programmes and now an invaluable resource for this school.
Support from Education Services, a local trust, has supported these programmes this year and we are delighted that grants from the County Council and The Evelyn Trust will enable us to continue working with both school in 2023/24. CCI artists Hilary Cox Condron and Tonka Uzu are facilitating these sessions with colleagues from Cambridge Acorn Project. Both schools are joining the wider artscaper network and drawing on the support this can offer.
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I have witnessed many significant moments. One week I watched how C dug a hole with a stick – like a small tunnel to another world. He has never dug a hole outside before he says. He tells me he never plays outside. Other children joined him, creating a fantasy world made of sticks and leaves, their gaming worlds starting to take shape in the earth. There were lively debates, fantastical stories, laughter and tears as villages, guardians and complex emotions played out in the mud. One girl told me ‘my ADHD can relax here’, another said she wished the session could go on for ever.
Hilary Cox Condron, CCI artist