Welcome to our online area for arts organisations. We hope you have arrived on this page because you or your organisation are passionate about working with children and young people.
Whether you are an individual looking for new cultural places to visit or an organisation interested in collaborating with artists or makers, the Surrey Culture Map will help you locate them.
Add your organisation to the map to help others find you. Explore news, insights and opportunities from the culture sector in Surrey by subscribing to the Surrey Culture Map Newsletter.
Visit the resources page for information about other cultural providers who have experience of working in Surrey schools.
The county of Surrey has a rich cultural heritage and presents a wide range of opportunities to schools for high quality cultural and artistic engagement.
Cultural resources and providers:
- Surrey Hills Arts
- Delight charity
- Guildford Shakespeare Company
- Strangeface Theatre Company
- Surrey History Centre
- Yvonne Arnaud Theatre
The Surrey based Arts Council England (ACE) National Portfolio Organisations (NPOs):
Surrey Museums Partnerships and Heritage sites such as Brooklands Museum.
Surrey County Council’s (SCC) network of 52 local libraries arts galleries such as:
Venues such as:
Other opportunities with:
- ACE Bridge organisation Artswork
- Surrey Arts, which is also the lead partner for Surrey Music Hub.
- Arts Partnership Surrey.
Not forgetting the many small companies and individual practitioners based in Surrey delivering work across all art forms.
Top tips
Whether you already deliver work in schools, or seek to develop new programmes, consider reviewing and clarifying your aims and success criteria. For example;
- Do you want children/young people to engage with your artform because of it’s powerful intrinsic value?
- Do you want to address particular broader issues such as mental health, low aspiration, anti-bullying?
- Do you want to try and improve attainment in a core curriculum area like numeracy or literacy?
Having clarified your aims, consider what outcomes you want. What will success look like and how will you measure it?
Collaboration
Identify which schools you could collaborate with. For example;
- what will be their context, primary, secondary, early years, special schools, pupil referral units?
- Will they have specialist units, for example for visual/hearing impairment, autistic spectrum disorder (ASD)
- Do they have higher numbers of Pupil or Service Premium pupils, or experience rural isolation?
- Could your programme extend to a cluster of schools and if so on what basis? For example, the cluster could be geographically based, comprising a secondary school and neighbouring feeder primary schools. Alternatively it could consist of schools that share a context, such as high Pupil Premium or Gypsy Roma Traveller (GRT) pupil numbers, or rural isolation.
Funding
Think about how your programme will be funded. School budgets are currently very challenged and you will almost certainly need to draw in external funding, possibly from several sources.
- Are there local philanthropic trusts who may be approachable?
- Are there other organisations you can partner with?
Surrey CEP has successfully drawn in funding from Arts Council England (ACE) and other sources for programmes in our schools, but match funding is almost always required and most funding of this type is directed at collaborative school clusters not individual schools. It’s also worth noting that Artsmark registration and Arts Award development are usually both a requirement for ACE funding for schools. Visit the Surrey Culture to see more funding sources.
Visit the Arts Partnership Surrey News and opportunities page or follow Arts Partnership Surrey (APS) on X for updates on opportunities and call-outs relating to upcoming APS projects. APS is a well established network led by representatives from many of the Surrey Districts and Boroughs.
