Institutional Context
Summary
UAL is a specialist HEI, ranked second in the world for its creative education and knowledge creation, with campuses across London, and an internationally diverse staff and student cohort. UAL delivers one of London’s largest programmes of creative professional development, and forms a significant part of the capital’s creative R&D, innovation and enterprise infrastructure, making a unique scale of contribution to London’s creative economy, which in turn supports economic growth across the UK and globally. Our Knowledge Exchange is shaped by our creative practices and pedagogies, engaging our partners, communities and publics in activities strategically focused on addressing particular challenges and/or places; and supporting policy agendas such as inclusive and sustainable growth, social justice, creative innovation, and resilient healthy communities.
Institutional context
Our underpinning values and mission place creativity at the heart of positive societal change, achieved through a focus on transformative education and creative enquiry. The issues that society faces are increasingly complex and dynamic, and so public service providers, industry, policy makers and civic organisations are increasingly turning to more creative, experimental and human-centred forms of problem-solving, to generate effective new solutions.
Such methodologies are inherent to the creative disciplines and collaborative pedagogies and practices that underpin UAL’s KE activity. These provide UAL with a strong embedded capacity for KE, attracting a diverse and high-profile range of partners. By engaging through ambitious forms of communication, collaboration, and creative prototyping, our ambition is to build resilient partnerships at every scale, working with individuals and organisations across government, industry, education, and civic society, using creative expertise to empower others and deliver tangible benefits for society and the economy.
As a specialist HEI, it is important we have a focused and distinctive approach to KE, leveraging our particular strengths and context. The specific histories and achievements of our Colleges, including their legacy as technical, trades and crafts colleges across London, have built a long tradition of civic engagement with the creative and professional life of the capital, as well as strong local partnerships and networks. It is founded on these strengths that we have developed our place-focused strategies, which combine the activities typically associated with ‘Public and Community Engagement’ and ‘Local Growth and Regeneration’ into integrated programmes of activity. In this way, place-making at UAL acts a strategic framework for planning and delivering much of our KE activity.
By taking a strategic place-based approach, we are able to achieve a clear focus and critical mass for our diversity of KE activities, and significant potential for scalable impact. This approach is underpinned by effective and inclusive sets of civic partnerships, which work together to leverage investment and address the challenges of the specific stakeholders and communities in these locations, based on clear evidence as to their needs and opportunities. Driven by our values of social justice and sustainability, we are also committed to promoting and achieving more ethical modes of production, enterprise and place-making through public engagement, and the partnerships and places we work with.
A distinctive characteristic of UAL’s approach is the high level of involvement of our students in these activities, who develop and acquire expert knowledge and skills by applying them in situated contexts where they may work - in different sectors, communities and places. This not only enables UAL to better deliver our core purpose and extend our impact, but also creates significant new social innovation capacity globally, through our graduates, whom independent research has shown to be the most enterprising of any HEI cohort in the UK.
For UAL, place-making is not just about being good neighbours within our local communities, but also extends into those places, sectors and clusters where our expertise aligns to local priorities, offering relevant opportunities for partnership working, meaningful exchange and mutual benefit.
For further information, please send queries to knowledge-exchange@arts.ac.uk
Local Growth and Regeneration
Summary of approach
UAL is a specialist arts university with a belief in the transformative power of creative education and inquiry. We are committed to social justice and sustainability, and our role in supporting creative economies at regional, national and international levels. Our approach to local growth and regeneration combines these missions, and focuses on several specific sub-regions across North, South and East London (with increasing focus on locales elsewhere in UK and Europe), where we have established industry, government, and civic stakeholder partnerships. In these places, our strategic partnerships work to leverage investment that supports inclusive growth, through activities focused on expanding creative jobs, skills, workspaces, enterprise and innovation within the local economy, as well as facilitating cohesive, resilient and healthy communities.
Aspect 1: Strategy
At UAL we combine our approach to strategic management of local growth & regeneration and public & community engagement activities through our place-making frameworks and associated institutional governance, where place-based governance groups provide coordinating oversight of our activity, and an over-arching Place-Making Working Group convenes practitioners to share knowledge and insights.
Our places for strategic focus in London reflect long-term commitments, stated in our HEIF Strategy 2016-2021, and reaffirmed in our KE Strategy 2021-26, but the partnerships, initiatives and scope continue to evolve. Currently, these are:
1. Fashion District – a large-scale fashion sector cluster covering multiple boroughs across East London and the Upper Lea Valley, based on a partnership led by UAL, involving strategic partners from across private, public and third sectors. Within this area, UAL and its partners in Queen Elizabeth Park, also helped found the SHIFT inclusive innovation district in 2022, with the shared ambition for the Park to become a living urban testbed for research and innovation to address the key challenges facing cities today.
2. Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter (KXKQ) – UAL helped found the KXKQ with the British Library, it is now one of the most significant knowledge clusters internationally, comprising 100+ academic, cultural, scientific and media partners. UAL’s work with KXKQ partners reaches across the wider boroughs of Camden and Islington, and UAL has contributed to development of the Camden STEAM Strategy 2022-2025, the Camden Education Strategy 2020 and an area-based strategy for Somers Town, led by Somers Town Community Association and Camden Council under Future Neighbourhoods 2030. UAL is also contributing to a long-term KXKQ placemaking strategy (KQ2050), to be launched in 2023. Our work in this area is informed by the needs/priorities highlighted in relevant local strategies: Camden 2025 (recently updated into We Make Camden) and Somers Town Plan.
3. South London Creative and Digital Cluster – originally focused around developments in the Old Kent Road Opportunity Area, but now expanded to include engagement with a range of emergent clusters across multiple South London boroughs, enabled through UAL’s participation in the STRIDE partnership and BIG South London Partnership, bringing together London HEIs with borough councils in a common effort to support innovation and growth across this sub-region of London.
The decision to focus on these areas is not only based on our physical presence in these areas, and a strategic alignment of our specialist expertise and resources with local economic and social needs (based on local intelligence provided by councils and third sector partners), but also on specific commissioned reports for these sub-regions, which have provided insights on creative economy opportunities, challenges, trends and needs. These reports have enabled UAL to focus our strategy on boroughs with a high concentration of creative businesses, or where significant growth is predicted.
Figure - Creative industries growth in London: BOP Consulting 2018
To ensure strategic alignment and responsiveness to local needs, UAL also maintains strong working relationships with the Mayor’s Office and Greater London Authority (GLA), and is also actively engaged in discussions regarding the creative economy-focused Thames Estuary Production Corridor - which research shows could create 50,000 jobs and generate £3.7bn for the UK.
In 2021/22 alone, UAL invested £158m in the regeneration of priority areas of London, through its capital programme, and will invest a further £390m by July 2027.
Aspect 2: Activity
Fashion District was launched in 2018 with a vision to strengthen London’s position as the global capital of fashion technology and drive economic and social transformation in East London. Backed by the Mayor of London, it was set up by UAL alongside industry and partners including UK Fashion and Textiles, British Fashion Council, The Trampery, Poplar HARCA, LLDC, and Westfield Stratford City. UAL funds operational coordination of the partnership, and a core innovation programme, and networking function.
Fashion District has 5 activity workstreams bringing together fashion, technology, business and education to:
1. Create a network of affordable workspaces
Fashion District has secured £15.6m for four major capital investments (representing 60,000 sq ft of affordable workspace and 14,000 sq ft of fashion skills training & manufacturing space across 4 sites): a community-focused fashion hub at Poplar Works with a training and manufacturing unit; workspaces for emerging fashion businesses; grow-on studios for more established businesses and a Tailoring Academy.
2. Nurture talent and provide upskilling
Between 2019-22, these capital projects have attracted funding to provide wrap-around support for resident businesses, accredited training in fashion production skills, and employment opportunities for local communities – such as the Making for Change programme at Poplar Works, which provides skills training and access to employment opportunities, by addressing regional shortages in skilled machinists for fashion production.
3. Create a connected community
In 2019/20, Fashion District introduced a new B2B connection service, enabling new connections to be made between designers and manufacturers, tech platforms and brands, start-ups/SMEs and suppliers, and businesses and investors. However, following the pandemic it was necessary to also support physical reconnection of this community, and so UAL produced the first Fashion District Festival - six days of fashion events, retail experiences and activations, with seven partners across five sites, showcasing innovation, promoting sustainability and supporting emerging talent.
4. Enable innovation and enterprise
In 2018/19, UAL-led consortium secured £5.5m from the AHRC-run ISCF-funded Creative Industries Clusters scheme, for the Business of Fashion, Textiles & Technology (BFTT) programme to support the growth of UK fashion, textiles and technology businesses through R&D/innovation, providing opportunities for many businesses linked to Fashion District. Between 2019-22 the programme successfully delivered the majority of its SME R&D programme, and UAL has now established the Fashion, Textiles and Technology Institute to continue this activity.
Fashion District has also run an annual industry innovation challenge, in collaboration with industry partners, to address key fashion sector challenges. This has led to tech solutions for retail, design and manufacturing, and innovative new products and processes.
5. Increase investment to support business and job growth
London Fashion Fund was established as a specific investment vehicle to support business growth in the Fashion District. Referral partners have provided a pipeline of businesses, who have been supported in making applications to the Fund. The Fashion District Festival also showcased practical investment opportunities, ranging in scale, expanding the network of potential investors for Fashion District businesses.
Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter (KXKQ)
During 2019-22, UAL continued to work intensively with organisations across KXKQ to enable inclusive growth and innovation, through the following inter-related activities:
1. Providing creative consultancy and start-up support
KX-based organisations commissioning consultancy work include: Arup, AstraZeneca, Google, Deepmind, Clear Channel, Universal Music, Nike, and New London Architecture. This consultancy provides opportunities to build important working relationships across KXKQ, and better understand mutual expertise/interests. UAL has also collaborated with the KQ Labs Accelerator, run and owned by The Francis Crick Institute, to provide strategic design guidance to data-driven health start-ups.
2. Delivering inclusive innovation
T-Factor - the overall challenge of the Euston Pilot, one of T-Factor’s 6 European pilots, is to demonstrate and accelerate the benefits of inclusive, equitable and regenerative development, by delivering programmes of work against 4 missions. The programme includes local strategic stakeholders such as Lendlease, KXKQ and Camden Council.
MAKE @ Story Garden is a social innovation initiative for which UAL has now successfully transitioned ownership to the local Community Association. MAKE provides a ‘neighbourhood hub’ for social entrepreneurs and local challenge-focused activities, including Future Neighbourhoods 2030 (FN2030), T-Factor, and a range of other climate, well-being and Covid-19 recovery projects delivered via The Public Collaboration Lab.
3. Strategic partnering with Camden Council
UAL expanded its partnership work with Camden Council, working across a range of policy areas linked to Camden’s Renewal Commission ‘Missions’, developed post-Covid-19. Key developments include:
Contributing to Camden’s education and STEAM programmes, including delivery of digital skills training in local schools (see Public & Community Engagement KEF narrative)
Delivery of circular economy and climate emergency projects, through FN2030, and contributing to a new area-based strategy for environmental change in Somers Town.
Scoping Learning Recognition for Social Action projects – this would see residents and non-students gain qualifications for involvement in community-focused projects.
South London Creative and Digital Cluster
Working with partners across this area, UAL delivered the following capacity-building activities during 2019-22:
Creative Futures – £120k STRIDE-funding enabled UAL to extend our incubation support to young entrepreneurs across South London for 12 months, with a focus on participants from communities under-represented within the creative industries, and also disproportionately impacted by the Covid-19 pandemic, supporting inclusive growth of the creative and digital sector growth in South London.
BIG Design Lab –secured £100k funding from the South London Partnership boroughs, towards providing a series of workshops with local businesses to co-design solutions to local growth and regeneration challenges, such as social inclusion and climate emergency.
Tech Yard – this educational initiative works to enable communities to critically engage with creative technologies across South London, and whilst originally focused on 10–14-year olds, there are now plans to expand this to work with young adults, due to local demand.
Elephant Recovery Project - a community collaboration between UAL and local enterprises, helping them grow their business and improve customer engagement through enhanced communications training and support, in everything from digital marketing, photography and social media to branding and visual identity.
Aspect 3: Results
Our methods for communicating and acting on results across our place-based activity typically involve:
Defining partnership objectives & KPIs, then monitoring and evaluating these during and post-project, and producing formal evaluation reports for larger-scale activities.
Regular partnership steering group meetings to ensure outcomes/impacts are acted upon and developed into follow-on activity.
Events, exhibitions, website/social-media and PR to communicate outputs.
Fashion District
During 2019 – 2022, despite Covid-19-related challenges, Fashion District successfully delivered the following:
London Fashion Fund brokered £2.35 millions of private sector, VC and Angel investment into 10 fashion SMEs. Evaluation of the Fashion District investment workstream resulted in a 3-year Investment Plan to expand the pipeline of investable businesses and breadth and depth of investor relationships. The report includes external recommendations for short, medium and long-term action.
The BFTT project raised £15.6m of co-investment from SMEs and partners, and awarded £2.8m to 35 pioneering SMEs with sustainability, innovation and social purpose at the heart of their businesses. The project engaged 1,772 businesses, mentored 68 CEOs, placed 28 post-docs and PhD students in SMEs, and created 51 jobs and 36 new products or services. In 2021, BFTT published a report, based on a national survey of over 2,400 SMEs and 100 industry specialists, providing a comprehensive picture of the FTT ecosystem, and identifying opportunities for investment, R&D, job creation, business growth and skills development.
The Trampery’s Sustainable Fashion Accelerator, and Forge Fashion Programme leveraged £245,000 for 58 SMEs to receive structured business support through Fashion District workspaces.
Fashion District Festival leveraged £121,000 of funding from partners including developers, retailers and public sector; showcased 64 brands; delivered 34 workshops; and engaged 1,100 people in person, and 5,200 through live-streaming. A student takeover supported the learning of young creatives, whilst connecting them to industry in East London.
Fashion District partners delivered an 11-month programme of business support and established a pop-up retail and innovation hub at The Lab E20 in Stratford, supporting 158 external businesses and leveraging £104.500 of support.
Making for Change held over 50 creative workshops with local communities, providing 20 participants with Level 1 and Level 2 Fashion Production training, and enabling 6 of these participants to progress into related employment. A pilot project, in collaboration with UKFT and Apparel Tasker, also helped to define progression routes for women entering Making for Change, by providing a programme of structured support into sustainable employment. In 2020, Poplar Works won the Design Council’s national award for Contribution to Place.
Fashion District’s annual innovation challenges leveraged cash prizes worth £70k from sponsors, and 14 industry partners provided in-kind prizes of studio space, business planning and professional memberships. Over 200 applications were submitted, and 33 shortlisted start-ups received business advice from 62 industry professionals.
In addition to these UAL/Fashion District-specific results, the broader impacts of East Bank Partnership, of which UAL is a partner, can be found in the 2022 East Bank Impact Report.
Creative Consultancy and Start-Up Support via KQ Labs
During 2019_22 CSM worked with 34 local organisations and generated a 72% increase in consultancy income (from local organisations)
Supported 30 start-ups via KQ Labs (10 per year over 3 years of engagement)
These collaborations have been evaluated via partner feedback, annual partnership reviews and investigating the needs of incoming KQ Labs cohorts to refine programme content.
2764 residents were engaged through 200+ participatory art & design workshops and activities. Further details can be found in the evaluation report produced by UAL’s Social Design Institute.
MAKE has been significant in strengthening relationships between local stakeholders and creating foundational infrastructure, enabling follow-on projects e.g. T-Factor and Future Neighbourhoods 2030.
Highlights of work between 2019-22 include:
Development of a Creative Consultation & Planning Toolkit, supporting resident led co-visioning, informed by synthesising 5-years of prior consultations to combat ‘consultation fatigue’;
Delivering c.30 community workshops/projects, engaging 1,000+ residents, leading to outcomes such as: a Story Trail connecting green spaces, and a 3D Digital archive constructed by diverse communities to valorise cultural heritage and foster new skills;
Exchange and piloting of models across different European sites e.g. Old Diorama Theatre (Euston) and La Friche (France);
Development of a monitoring & evaluation framework & tools report – one of the key project resources to help evidence T-Factor’s impact.
GLA Future Neighbourhoods 2030 (Phase 1 and 2)
As part of this consortia, UAL has contributed to addressing climate challenges through:
Phase 1 (2021/22) - invigorating a circular economy market on Chalton Street in Somers Town, providing infrastructure and community greening initiatives.
Phase 2 scoping (2022/23) – UAL will pilot learning recognition for climate/social activists within the local area and continue to support the Chalton Street Market.
See Public & Community Engagement KEF narrative for more detais.
South London Creative and Digital Cluster
Creative Futures has so far reached 91 participants (76 from target groups) through 264 engagements, created 37 new businesses and 2 new jobs. An externally commissioned evaluation of the programme is underway to draw out the impacts of the programme, and the results and learning from these will be published publicly. In addition to this, Creative Futures is holding a celebration event at our new community engagement space in Peckham in February 2023, bringing together local policy makers, businesses, entrepreneurs and creative industry mentors to celebrate the success of the programme. A promotional film is also in production.
BIG Design Lab will commence in spring/summer 2023.
Tech Yard have run three successful online cohorts and engaged with over 100 young people in South London and will now expand this through our physical community engagement hub in Peckham.
Elephant Recovery Project provided direct support to 30 businesses, providing them with a mixture of training and tangible assets that they can use to promote their businesses.
Public & Community Engagement
Summary of approach
As the UK’s largest art and design university, with campuses across London, a commitment to public and community engagement (P&CE) lies at the core of UAL’s social purpose, and our distinctive approach embraces the public context as a learning environment, and staff and students as societal resources. For UAL, culture and creativity are fundamentally collaborative and engaged, undertaken with a broad range of publics, drawing meaning and value from interactions and relationships with others. In practice this means our staff deliver a high volume of P&CE activity, much of which is individually-led and practice-based, and so we use a place-based approach to strategically manage this activity, to ensure a coordinated approach to external engagement, effective prioritization and meaningful evaluation.
Aspect 1: Strategy
UAL’s approach to P&CE is embedded in our academic practices and throughout our institutional strategy, enabling us to: enrich our students’ education through participatory and engaged practices; provide greater accessibility to creative education for all; and change the world through our creative endeavour, by focusing research and KE in areas that will deliver greatest social, environmental and economic impact. As an institution with a strong tradition of participatory practice-based research methodologies and pedagogies, P&CE is frequently our process for knowledge co-creation and co-application, and not just a mechanism for dissemination or demonstration.
In addition, P&CE is a core strand within our KE Strategy 2021-26, with six specific objectives and related KPIs that we are committed to delivering against. The objectives are:
To grow the scale and reach of our P&CE, inspiring diverse and new audiences, and engaging more individuals and groups from local communities in cultural production, through participatory practices that support upskilling and increased creative confidence.
To work with our civic and community partners to access new and increased levels of project funding to support delivery of our shared objectives.
To pursue greater access and wider participation in creative education at all levels, through partnerships with schools, colleges and other Further Education providers.
To expand the role of high-quality P&CE in strengthening our civic partnerships in places of strategic focus, ensuring successful integration with wider programmes of activity.
To significantly increase our institutional reach, by building upon our learning from the Covid-19 pandemic, and digitally platforming more of our P&CE activities, and working with partners to improve the innovative quality of our engagement platforms and tools.
To further develop the strategic focus of our P&CE activities, and gain external recognition for their strength and quality, and our approach to continuous improvement.
We take a place-based approach to strategically managing our P&CE, to ensure our high volume of activities are coordinated and aligned inclusively to the specific needs of those places/communities/publics, and the strategic priorities of the civic partnerships that underpin these. Whilst our full P&CE portfolio engages with a range of places and publics regionally, nationally, and globally, and attracts large diverse audiences, our ‘priority places’ in terms of our strategic management frameworks are: 1. East Bank / Fashion District, 2. Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter, 3. South London Creative and Digital Cluster (with a particular focus in Southwark for P&CE). Each of these places has its own partnership-based governance groups (external to UAL), with their own shared objectives. In addition, UAL also has internal place-specific governance groups providing oversight for each area, and an over-arching Place-Making Working Group convening practitioners to share plans, knowledge and insights across UAL. These groups are part of our wider KE governance structures at UAL.
In each of these places, UAL has developed strategic partnerships with all of the local Borough Councils, as well as a range of other public, private and third sector partners. It is through these partnerships that we are able to activate the quintuple helix innovation model of civic engagement, pooling intelligence and insights around local needs and challenges (including audience and EDI data), to effectively leverage the assets and expertise of academia, business, community and the public sector to address these, through co-developed interventions that are considerate of environmental impact. UAL is a values-led social purpose organisation, and we seek to reflect this in all our P&CE activity.
Aspect 2: Support
For each of our priority places, we have distinct local partnerships support infrastructure:
East Bank / Fashion District
Our P&CE work is developed and supported in collaboration with our strategic partners for both East Bank and Fashion District, and we work closely together to secure external grant funding for delivery of our shared objectives.
However, in terms of UAL-specific support for this activity – our Making for Change programme (based at Poplar Works) is delivered by the Social Responsibility team for London College of Fashion (LCF) who co-create with local residents, youth and community/cultural organisations, students, designers and businesses. This programme is developed through community consultation, and revised annually to ensure currency for this community.
In addition to existing staff who deliver P&CE for Fashion District, a new Cultural Programming team has been created, specifically focused on the East Bank. This will enable us to maximise opportunities generated by UAL’s new LCF campus on the Olympic Park, opening in 2023.
Kings Cross Knowledge Quarter (KXKQ)
UAL is a founder and board member of KXKQ, and works strategically in partnership with Camden Council and the local Somers Town Community Association (STCA). It is through these relationships that UAL gains the insights and intelligence required to make our P&CE here responsive to local needs (including audience insights), and we jointly co-ordinate our shared efforts and resources to support of these and wider partnership P&CE programmes.
UAL’s Central Saint Martins College, based in Kings Cross, provides the primary P&CE support infrastructure for these relationships, through dedicated P&CE specialists in College-wide functions. External Liaison Coordinator roles, embedded in academic programmes, also provide more local support.
In addition, UAL’s Public Collaboration Lab, based at the College, is a significant platform for generating and managing research/KE-driven P&CE projects, such as the pan-European Horizon 2020-funded T-Factor project, and MAKE@Storygarden.
Southwark
To ensure responsiveness to community needs in this area UAL has formed a strategic partnership with Citizen’s UK - including membership of Southwark and Peckham Citizen’s – using the community-organising methodology of, listening to and working with local people on their priorities.
To support P&CE in this area, UAL has established a professional P&CE team with permanent roles including: Head of Public Engagement, a Community Engagement Manager and Producer, and Public Programme Manager. This team helps to develop strategy, upskill staff and students, P&CE activity and support evaluation.
Finally, at the institutional level, individual contributions to P&CE are recognised and rewarded within our Academic Career Pathways (our KE Pathway has specific P&CE criteria), with potential to progress to Reader or Professor across all Pathways. In addition, to recognise exceptional P&CE contributions in-year, UAL presents a P&CE award, as part of broader annual KE Awards. In 2021-22 this award went to Tech Yard, a Southwark-based, free, creative computing club, run and funded by UAL’s Creative Computing Institute.
Aspect 3: Activity
P&CE is core to our mission. During 2019-22, despite the challenges presented by Covid-19, UAL has typically dedicated c.650 days of academic staff time to deliver engagement with well over 500,000 people across over 300 P&CE initiatives per year. This volume makes it challenging to provide a true picture of the diverse and rich activities undertaken. However, the following are illustrative examples of our place-based work:
Rego a project built on a pilot initiative with Catalyst in Communities and London Borough of Waltham Forest, aimed at tackling knife crime and providing employment opportunities for young people (strategic priorities within the area). In 21-22 the project secured £50k from Foundation for Future London to scale up across four of our partner East London boroughs. A video case study can be viewed here.
The Lab E20 was a commissioned 6-month P&CE programme in Stratford, East London, involving community workshops and events and pop-up retail – all aligned to the Fashion District partnership’s strategic objectives. The commission completed in 2022, having engaged 4,368 individuals across 69 events with 58 delivery partners.
UAL, in partnership with V&A East, delivered a public engagement programme 'East Bank Presents 2022' on behalf of East Bank Partners, this included a range of events, public art commissions and participatory activities involving East London-based artists and cultural partners. The programme was financially supported by East Bank partners and Foundation for Future London.
UAL is part of the Future Neighbourhoods 2030-winning consortia led by Camden Council, STCA and KXKWQ, delivering a programme aimed at addressing climate challenges locally. During Phase 1 (2021/22) UAL worked to invigorate a circular economy market and provided community infrastructure and engagement around greening initiatives on local estates. In phase 2 (2022/23) UAL will pilot learning recognition for local climate/social activists and continue providing design consultancy for Chalton Street Market. For details of outputs and feedback.
MAKE@Storygarden is a long-term public studio space initiative that UAL is delivering with The Living Centre/STCA, Camden Council, and Lendlease. Phase 1 concluded in 2021, after engaging 1,700 residents, and publishing an evaluation report. In January 2022 Phase 2 commenced, with operational management transferring to STCA (with UAL’s support), and a further 1,064 community residents participated in over 200 workshops or sessions.
in 2021/2022, UAL extended its digital skills and technology learning programme to work with external audiences and young people in Camden. Working with Camden’s STEAM team, in support of Camden’s STEAM Strategy and Camden Education Strategy 2030. UAL launched a series of primary school workshops, and an immersive summer school and exhibition for secondary school pupils, exploring future career options in creative-tech roles. UAL also ran a series of public online talks exploring links between technology, living systems and art & design, engaging 4,000+ participants.
Working across places
UAL has also invested in enabling staff to work across these places. Climate Studio was a multi-site P&CE project, leveraging over £120K in co-investment, using the thematic of tackling climate-challenges locally (a strategic priority across our partner boroughs) to run three parallel public studio projects with our place-based partners, managing and evaluating these projects in conjunction with each other to enhance sharing and learning– including piloting several novel evaluation methods. Video case study.
Working nationally
In addition to our place-based work, the following is an example of the national-scale P&CE work that UAL delivers:
20/20 is an ambitious 3-year programme launched by UAL’s Decolonising Arts Institute in November 2021, with funding from Freelands Foundation, Arts Council England and UAL.
Combining artist residencies with commissioning at scale, 20/20 is bringing together 20 emerging artists of colour and 20 UK public art collections; leading to 20 new permanent acquisitions; a series of commissioned texts; and a public programme bringing artists, curators and writers into conversation. This directly aligns with UAL’s strategic priorities of anti-racism and decolonisation and increasing diversity in creative and cultural industries.
Aspect 4: Enhancing practice
Due to the volume and scale of UAL’s P&CE activity, and its embeddedness across our academic activities, it has not been considered practical to evaluate each of our P&CE activities individually, although we do capture data for each initiative. Rather, we’ve taken the more strategic and pragmatic approach of developing place-based partnership frameworks, enabling us to direct our P&CE activities towards shared sets of objectives, informed by intelligence on local needs and priorities. We can then jointly evaluate outcomes and measure progress against objectives at the strategic level, with partners who directly and credibly represent different local stakeholder interests. This is how we work with East Bank and KXKQ partners, and we are developing similar frameworks with our South London partners.
To ensure that, where appropriate, P&CE objectives and KPIs developed within these shared frameworks are consistent in their articulation across our different priority places, we have identified our own set of institutional P&CE Objectives and KPIs, as part of our wider KE Strategy (see section1) and KE KPIs framework, to act as a reference point. In addition to participant and activity metrics, we seek to capture funding and in-kind resourcing leveraged by our partnerships. We are also exploring adoption of the ‘infra-structuring’ model of theory of change for place-making, developed through T-Factor, to create a common methodological understanding.
In addition, where we are delivering larger scale P&CE activities, we ensure sufficient resources to conduct project-specific evaluation (see T-Factor Outreach report and Making for change), and use these opportunities to develop/pilot novel methodologies (see MAKE evaluation report and Climate Studio evaluation), and/or to learn from our partners’ approaches.
Finally, in terms of local tools and support for staff, UAL has commissioned tailored social impact evaluation training workshops, run several times a year to maximise staff access, providing guidance on using Theory of Change to develop bespoke planning and evaluation approaches for P&CE. Staff can then record activity/outcomes data on UAL’s research information system (Elements), supporting our annual reporting process. UAL’s Place-Making Working Group also brings together staff from across UAL to share best practice, and we provide seed funding for P&CE through our KE Impact Fund, distributed via local KE governance groups.
Aspect 5: Building on success
During 2019-22, two significant factors impacted P&CE. Firstly, Covid-19 led to suspension of physical P&CE activities (challenging for a participatory and place-based delivery culture), and a transition to virtual and then hybrid delivery; and secondly, UAL has experienced significant change in its executive, leading to a refresh of institutional strategy, and renewed focus on our social purpose. In both cases, whilst ultimately reinvigorating our approach to P&CE, they have also created disruption to existing ways of working, and required staff to reflect on and adapt their practices.
To capitalise upon this period of change and revitalisation, UAL has commissioned NCCPE to undertake a strategic review of its approach to P&CE in 2022-23, towards better harnessing our institutional strengths, evidencing our successes, and identifying and addressing areas requiring improvement.
Despite the above challenges, within our priority places and related P&CE delivery, we have continued to make significant progress in 2019-22, evidenced through the validation of our strategic partners, and our shared frameworks.
In East Bank and the Fashion District, our internal governance has ensured alignment of our efforts and resources with those of our partnership objectives. This impact is measured annually through the East Bank Benefits Delivery Plan, and reported publicly through the East Bank Impact Report.
The Making for Change programme, which was developed through robust initial research, has been positively evaluated as part of the overall evaluation of the GLA’s London Regeneration Fund, as well as being highlighted as an exemplar project and featured on the GLA’s website through its own video case study. In recognition of the impact of this work, the Portal Trust has now granted UAL a £4m award, which will be used to establish the Portal Centre for Social Impact in 2023 in East Bank. This will house the Social Responsibility team who manage and deliver the Making for Change programme, and ensure this work continues and that this innovative model can be developed and transferred into new contexts.
As can be seen from Section 3, UAL’s work in KXKQ during 2019-22 has developed to become highly supportive of Camden’s strategic objectives, and in recognition of its success, in 2022/23 we will be working with Camden Council to establish a formal MOU and place-based partnership with the corporate strategy department. With Somers Town Community Association there is already a partnership structure in place for the joint management of MAKE, providing a key local asset for our P&CE work.
As mentioned in Section 2, UAL seeks to partner with existing community and neighbourhood structures to play an active stakeholder role, rather than developing separate structures, e.g. our engagement on the Somers Town Neighbourhood Forum and Southwark and Peckham Citizen’s, and in these positions we seek to ‘work into’ and support local area-based strategies, rather than developing separate UAL-specific ones.
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