A somewhat plaintive email came through today, the last message from Brightspace – Birmingham’s agents for Creative Partnerships. It’s sad because Brightspace were behind a huge number of inspirational projects that took artists into schools to work creatively with students and teachers. Now, despite a great report from OFSTED setting out the great value of these projects, the plug as been pulled, the axe has fallen, the bubble burst, the goose cooked, the turkey plucked, the swan sung and the full stopped.
Stan’s Cafe missed out on the first wave of C.P. work but were commissioned in 2002 to create a teacher training event and from this time on we did increasing amounts of work for Bright Space until we needed to created a full-time post to coordinate and help deliver it. The post lasted about three years and even after it ceased the majority of our education work has continued to be for either Bright Space or its sister organisation commissioning Creative Partnerships projects in other areas of the country.

Early next month we will sit down to ponder our education ambitions and options post-Brightspace. For now we will remember fondly those partners with whom we worked on all those exciting projects, the students, teachers, fellow artists, creative agents, commissioners and administrators.