About the project
The project runs from June 2025 to May 2026 and is funded by UKRI Research England Higher Education Innovation Funding.
Background
Creative arts education has been shown to improve young people’s (YP) attitudes to learning, social development, and mental wellbeing (Fancourt & Finn, 2019).
The Education Endowment Fund recommends creative arts education as a cost-effective way of closing the disadvantage gap for YP living with existing inequalities. Yet, to date, few studies:
Purpose
Our proposed ‘’Creativity For All’ mixed-method field experiment evaluates the impact of the National Saturday Club (NSC) beyond a three-month period. The NSC is a free weekly non-formal extracurricular creative arts education program. It is for 13–16-year-olds living with existing inequalities and neurodivergent needs.
76% of YP attendees either:
- live in the 30% of most deprived areas (30%)
- receive Free School Meal (22%), or
- are neurodivergent/SEN (15%–25%).
The project combines:
Aims
This project has the following aims.
Aim 1
Develop with NSC stakeholders (YP, tutors, parents) a psychometrically robust measure of ‘what works’ in successful creative Saturday Clubs. We will use surveys/interviews for best capture of individual stakeholder perspectives.
Aim 2
Measure YP’s mental wellbeing and education attitudes across the eight-month NSC program. We will use surveys at three time points:
- T0 = October 2025.
- T1 = February 2026.
- T2 = June 2026.
These surveys will assess stability/change of levels of mental wellbeing in YP. Findings will be disseminated to all stakeholders at an end-of-year event and outputs.
Aim 3
Co-create with stakeholders an accessible/shareable end-of-project output or event. This will celebrate successful creative Club features for replication by new clubs and other organisations and bodies working with YP.
Methodology
To address the three project aims, UCL, NSC’s team and its YP will collaborate closely on:
- collecting club tutors’ views on ‘what works’ in successful clubs at the June 2025 NSC Tutor Conferences in Manchester and London (N = 60)
- co-designing and conducting follow-up surveys/one-on-one interviews online or over the phone with YP/tutors over eight months (N = 100~)
- co-developing a dissemination/end-of-project report to be presented at the summer NSC exhibition at Somerset House to all participants/stakeholders.
Regular fortnightly team meetings will inform each step of this project.
Contact us
Centre for Education and Criminal Justice (ECJ)
Department of Psychology and Human Development
UCL Institute of Education
University College London
20 Bedford Way
London WC1H 0AL
Image
Sam Robinson for UCL.